The French New Wave: A Cinema Revolution

How could the Cannes Film Festival become the biggest cinema event in the world? For 75 years, Cannes has succeeded in this prodigy of placing cinema, its sometimes paltry splendors but also its requirements of great modern art, at the center of everything, as if, for ten days in May, nothing was more important than it. This film tells how Cannes has become the largest film festival in the world by opening up to cinematic modernity while never forgetting that cinema remains a performing art, a popular art.

Very few Icons have at once embodied the Myths of their own country while revealing its contradictions: heiress of the Hollywood star system and muse of the French auteur Cinema, Academy Award winning actress and committed producer, feminist and aerobic queen, activist and fearless businesswoman… In a lifetime, Jane Fonda may have reconciled all the facets of America without renouncing her own integrity. Through her portrait, the film tells a social and political story while drawing the picture of a typically American phenomenon.

Godard by Godard is an archival self-portrait of Jean-Luc Godard. It retraces the unique and unheard-of path, made up of sudden detours and dramatic returns, of a filmmaker who never looks back on his past, never makes the same film twice, and tirelessly pursues his research, in a truly inexhaustible diversity of inspiration. Through Godard’s words, his gaze and his work, the film tells the story of a life of cinema; that of a man who will always demand a lot of himself and his art, to the point of merging with it.

Jacques Demy’s ability to enchant audiences was rooted in his personal struggles and doubts as a showman, establishing him as one of French cinema’s greatest artists.