Camera Lucida

Man has always sought to seek further afield. After the seafaring explorers of the 16th century, 21st century cosmologists today navigate more celestial oceans, with each mission providing an ever-broader and more impressive cartography of our surroundings. At the avant garde of modern technology, these strange travellers are actually immobile, and their vessels are powerful and spectacular telescopes, on the Earth or in space, constantly widening the limits of our knowledge and giving form to our dreams of infinity. From Hawaii to Australia, via South Africa and China, we set out on an incredible scientific and human adventure to visit the planet's greatest cosmic exploration centres to discover the new challenges involved in understanding the universe. A journey on Earth and in the heavens that will take your breath away!

In 1965 Ingmar Bergman filmed “Persona”, the cult film that brought together all of the Swedish filmmaker’s obsessions and became a turning point in his career.

Slovenian conductor Martina Batič and the Radio France Choir offers an eclectic programme combining Wagner, Debussy, Fauré and Poulenc. The choir is accompanied by eight cellists from the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio de France.

Go inside the building that has been the source of some of the greatest moments in music, ballet and opera.

How only one man all at the same time painted the Mona Lisa, conceived ball bearing and gave the first clinical description of atherosclerosis? On the occasion of the 500th anniversary of his death, this documentary will answer these questions and much more, gathering clues thanks to research on the field and encounters with the most outstanding specialists on Leonardo Da Vinci. Travelling through time thanks to an imaginary museum, we will track back the Renaissance genius and give you to see Leonardo’s relentless ingenuity!

Melody Gardot performs her new album Sunset in the Blue, from the Radio France studios accompanied by a trio of musicians and 40 instrumentalists from the in-house orchestra.

Elliott Erwitt has spent his entire adult life taking photographs, of presidents, popes and movie stars, as well as regular people and their pets. His work is iconic in world culture while his life is largely unknown.

Accompanied by a child, the mathematician Galileo observes the firmament with a telescope. Ten years ago, the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned in Rome for having supported the idea of an infinite and centerless universe, based on the work of Copernicus. By dint of observations and calculations, Galileo seeks proofs for his hypothesis of a cosmic system where the Earth is "an ordinary celestial body, one among thousands". From Padua to Venice, the mathematician shakes certainties by confronting the power of a Church which wishes to maintain its absolute power in the "crystal spheres" where Ptolemy has hitherto locked up the world.

The prodigious genesis of a monument of world literature, too often reduced to its popular success, also recounts the tormented conversion of its author, Victor Hugo, to the ideal of social progress.

The Philharmonie de Paris celebrates its tenth anniversary and invites Klaus Mäkelä and Gustavo Dudamel to perform a concert of changing colours, from modernism to impressionism, with works by Boulez, Beethoven, Poulenc, Moussorgski and Ravel.

Is a spectacular journey across 4 billion years of evolution exploring how the Moon has been essential in setting up the pace to create life on Earth and how it has been a source of inspiration and fascination for men ever since

Founded in 2012 by Laurence Equilbey, the Insula Orchestra performs on period instruments and experiments with new concert formats. In summer 2018, the French conductor and her ensemble will present a little-known work by Mozart at the Parisian cultural center La Seine Musicale: the incidental music to "Thamos, King in Egypt". In 1773, the author Tobias Philipp Freiherr von Gebler asked his fellow Freemason Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to compose incidental music for his heroic drama "Thamos, King of Egypt". The boy wonder composed two choruses and five interludes for the play, which took up the Egyptian theme popular in the 18th century.

Every night, a father tells his son a bedtime story. As if by challenge, the child always chooses the same book, with scores, orchestra photos and images of animals. It’s about Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Carnival of the Animals”. Under the impetus of the gentle complicity of father and son, this somewhat austere book is transformed, comes to life and makes music: the carnival animals come to life...

Two young adults, Clara and Hidalgo, meet in the Verdon canyon. Everything opposes them: interests, skin color, openness to others. Hidalgo decides to relive, a hundred years later, the adventure of Édouard-Alfred Martel, the first explorer of the Verdon canyon, when Clara comes to hike in the region. This meeting, at a turning point in their lives, will allow them each to live a strong experience that will mark them for a long time...

A meditation on the passing of all things and an affirmation of faith in creative power, Symphony No. 2 in C minor, "Resurrection," remains undoubtedly the most popular of Gustav Mahler's symphonies. The iconoclastic Romeo Castellucci (whose version of Mozart's Requiem in Aix-en-Provence in 2019 caused quite a stir) joins forces with Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen for a radical reinterpretation of this existential fresco.