Movies: Biographical documentary

In just ten films, Maurice Pialat painfully rose to the top of the cinema, draining into his legend a mad demand for truth as much as memorable fury to achieve it. With "L'Enfance nue", his first feature film at the age of 43, the filmmaker immediate...

“As I child, I always had music in my head. I thought everybody did,” the legendary conductor Sir Simon Rattle recalls. His charming and humorous reflections on the unifying magic of conducting are complemented by interviews with well-known contempor...

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Barbra Streisand grew up in working class Brooklyn, dreaming of escape from her tough childhood. A stellar student, she resisted the pressure to go to college as her sights were firmly set on Broadway. She was determined to become an actress and land...

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An Okinawan photographer, Mao Ishikawa was 33 years old when she crossed the ocean to Philadelphia in order to photograph the life of her friend, Myron Carr, a former US marine whom she met during his service in Okinawa in the 1970s. The subsequent p...

Helen Mirren, the most versatile of British actresses, has played diverse roles in her long and distinguished career, from sexually charged Shakespearian roles to secret agents to Queen Elizabeth II. This documentary paints a portrait of a strong wom...

The untold true story of how Dave Tomkins, originally a safe-cracker from London, rose from small-time criminal to international mercenary and arms dealer, enabling death and destruction around the world....

Eighteen years after her death, a poignant portrait of the formidable actress that was Marie Trintignant. No documentary has ever been devoted to the career of Marie Trintignant, whose tragic death at the hands of her partner unfairly overshadowed h...

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For three years, Vincent Lindon recorded himself on his iPhone to document his insecurities, fears and fits of rage as if in a diary. Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai use these unique recordings to paint an unusual portrait of the actor, who open...

A film about the gold panning adventures of Hans Söderström, an indigenous Swede. The story stretches from Scandinavia to Africa, via Asia and the Americas, but ultimately boils down to the simple boyish dream of finding gold. Lots of it....

Eccentric and provocative, Lady Gaga is undoubtedly the greatest pop diva. The one who is actually called Stefani Germanotta is a brilliant artist, capable of all the excesses, but also a wounded woman, marked by a terrible drama. An artist who had t...

If something of import has taken place in our lifetimes, chances are that Steve McCurry has photographed it, from the wars in the Arab world to the 9/11 attacks. Denis Delestrac’s documentary on the photographer charts McCurry’s journey through a res...

An Okinawan photographer, Mao Ishikawa spent her early 20s working as a barmaid in establishments catered specifically to African American GIs stationed in Okinawa. “There was love,” as the tagline reads, her photography book, 『Red Flower – The Women...

Since the 1970s‚ Martin Parr has fearlessly held out his unique photographic mirror and given us some of the most extraordinary and unique visual clichés of modern times. Sometimes serious‚ often absurd but always playful‚ his insightful and often ac...

1962. A crystalline voice becomes a planetary tube. A Belgian nun jostles Elvis and the Beatles on the world charts. Her name: Sister Smile. A popstar with the trajectory of a comet who understands her success no more than the double meaning of her w...

This documentary about legendary French chanteuse Edith Piaf begins at her birth (which was helped along by a cop), travels through her turbulent romantic history, follows her to the pinnacle of her success and reports on her death. Piaf was queen of...