Zadig Productions

What is striking when you talk with mathematicians is that sparkle in their eyes, and their sudden joyful voice trying to share with you a concept, a theory. They continuously use words such as invention, beauty, freedom. You then ask yourself : how such a rich language, this quasi-philosophical proposition about the world becomes rejected by a majority, 'the only discipline where one prides itself to be bad at it'!

Julie Andrews starred in Hollywood productions that have become iconic movies, winning an Oscar for her performance as Mary Poppins, a symbol of the magic of musicals from the 1960s. And yet, behind the squeaky-clean image hides a much more tortuous career, with its moments of glory and tough times, all of which explain the longevity of a story that is still being written.

As Russian writer Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) thinks it is impossible that his novel Doctor Zhivago is published in the Soviet Union, because it supposedly shows a critical view of the October Revolution, he decides to smuggle several copies of the manuscript out of the country. It is first published in 1957 in Italia and the author receives the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, which has consequences.

Gustave Folcher, a French farmer, wrote in his 1939 diary that the summer had been long and hot. He was not alone. Many other anonymous French men and women wrote of the beauty and warmth of those summer months and how threats of war were far from their minds. Through home movies, diaries and letters, One Last Summer describes the final weeks of peace in France and the mix of blindness, denial and prophetic clear-sightedness of those facing the war that was about to unfold.

A reckoning of Nazi Germany’s planned execution of its own citizens with physical and mental disabilities whom they deemed useless to their society.

According to the official Cuban version, Fidel Castro died on his bed on November 25, 2016. Sixty years after his arrival on the island, with his troop of guerrillas who came to fight the Batista dictatorship, the director went to meet Cubans who talk about the Lider Maximo, who escaped - according to rumor - more than 630 assassination attempts! For his funeral, Fidel Castro had orchestrated a spectacular procession before his death so that his ashes crossed the island on the same route - in reverse - that he carried out when he was young.

Teen movies have had a great impact on the movie industry - especially in the 80s. This documentary takes a closer look at the genre's origins and the impact it has made up till today.

Martha is 30 years old in 2031. She spent a happy childhood in a family not quite like the others since she was adopted by two men. Now, one of them is dead and the other is losing his memory

The documentary delves into Éric Rohmer's distinctive filmmaking process, using film clips, rare interviews, and unreleased test footage.

They have no roots, no seeds, no flowers, but mosses show immense survival capacities and can suspend their biological activity for long periods. Today, researchers are exploring the exceptional resistance of these archaic organisms. British ecologists have even resurrected a "zombie" moss that has been trapped in the permafrost for 1,500 years. Associated with decay and disliked in Europe, mosses are deified in Japan. With 25,000 species worldwide, bryophytes - their scientific name - are the seat of real ecosystems, and can develop in inhospitable landscapes, through an extravagant reproduction cycle.

The story of Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) and his masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, published in Paris in 1973, which forever shook the very foundations of communist ideology.

Marc Chagall was an artist caught between two worlds, between traditional art and modernism, figuration and abstraction. The film accompanies him on an important stage of his life from 1910 to 1930, between Paris and Vitebsk. Chagall's home town was a laboratory for the artistic avant-garde in Belarus, while Paris was the center of modern art movements.

Born in 1929 in Brussels, Audrey Hepburn was abandoned by her father at 6. Sent in an english boarding school, she immersed herself into classical dance, a school of grace and discipline which will leave a mark on her whole existence. Just after World War II, her career rose underneath Colette's support : in 1951, the french author chose this « treasure found on the beach » of Monte Carlo to incarnate her Gigi in Broadway. Since then, offers came tumbling out.

Gene Kelly is a legend of the heyday of the Hollywood musical. His name stands for masterpieces such as "Singin' in the Rain" and "An American in Paris". As a singer, dancer, actor, choreographer and director, he was a true all-round artist who revolutionized the world of dance in particular. Kelly, who loved to experiment, explored new forms of dance expression and helped a whole generation of young talents to fame. From his beginnings in cabarets and on Broadway to his recognition as a choreographer and director, the documentary shows how the good-looking star with a charming smile expanded the boundaries of dance expression: He danced in the open air in the streets of New York, with a cartoon character or his own reflection. But this dazzling entertainer image should not obscure the fact that Kelly, as a staunch supporter of the American civil rights movement, also saw dancing as a political statement.

To be in Venice and see the architecture of New York, to perceive in a painting by Tintoretto the birth of animated images, to look at the burlesque Cretinetti as the ancestor of montage - so many shifts, displacements, and striking telescopings that Philippe-Alain Michaud proposes in this film dedicated to him. To follow this art historian, curator of the cinema collections at the Centre Pompidou, is to go from the oriental carpet to the film, or from the first fireworks to the cinema. And everywhere the animation of the images - projections of Antony McCall, or of Paul Sharits, Column without end of Brancusi, Pasolini's Accatone - everything moves! Under the tutelage of Aby Warburg, the great art historian of the early twentieth century, precursor of iconology and image comparison, to whom Philippe-Alain Michaud was the first in France to devote an important essay, eleven images are placed on the table to describe the singular journey of this art historian.

On October 27, 2005, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré died in an electrical substation while fleeing the police, sparking three weeks of riots across France. A decade later, as the officers involved are acquitted, the film revisits the voices of those who lived through the uprising. Through their stories, it explores what remains of that anger and how their view of society has evolved.