François Lévy-Kuentz

Charismatic and resourceful, seducer and daredevil, Jean-Paul Belmondo has always played his roles as he lived, at a thousand miles an hour. He had only one passion: to entertain the public with his smile, his naturalness, his energy, his stunts. But contrary to appearances, his destiny was full of pitfalls. This film lifts the veil on a founding childhood that allowed him to overcome many obstacles throughout his life thanks to the tutelary figures of his father and mother. Told from the inside with the help of his autobiography, interviews and unpublished archives, this epic story traces the career of this turbulent young actor who launched the New Wave in Breathless before becoming the popular Bebel, an indestructible and provocative vigilante. From film to film, this documentary paints an intimate portrait of a man who built himself up to reach the top: his triumphs but also his trials, his doubts, his secrets, his angers, his clowning, his disappointments or his personal dramas.

Portrait of Panama Al Brown, a great boxer in the 30's, and its story with France, with a focus on its relationship with Jean Cocteau, surrealist, poet, director, artist.

La Garoupe, a beach in Antibes, in 1937. For one summer, the painter and photographer Man Ray films his friends Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Paul Eluard and his wife Nusch, as well as Lee Miller. During these few weeks, love, friendship, poetry, photography and painting are still mixed in the carefree and the creativity specific to the artistic movements of the interwar period.

Alexander Calder revolutionized the art of sculpture with his distinctive modernism, freeing sculpture from its stand and adding movement to the art itself. He rose to fame in the 1930s with his renowned Miniature Circus but his modernist creativity skyrocketed with his wire sculptures, an invention he dubbed "drawing in space."

Don Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) as intimately portrayed by his friends (Carlos Saura, Jean-Claude Carrière) and actors (Michel Piccoli, Carole Bouquet). Libertarian, subversive, deeply affected by the cruelty and violence of the world, despising jargon and psychology, fond of jokes: such was Luis Buñuel, a towering—and unclassifiable—filmmaker. He left behind over thirty films exploring such themes as cruelty, fetishism, desire and sexual frustration, the bourgeoisie, class struggle, religion, Surrealism, the power of the imagination, along with an autobiography and a few interviews, which form the framework of this portrait.

Director Francois Levy-Kuentz's film uses previously unreleased archival material, such as Klein's personal films, to capture the artist's astonishing career, from its beginning in 1954 to his death in 1962. In those eight short years, Klein turned the modern art world upside down.