Jean Cocteau

"Fly too high and you will burn, go too low and you won't breathe." Shot in just seven consecutive days during the summer of 2023, it concludes the first volume of Bliss, a playlist of sounds and shapes. Daedalus delves into the perilous dance between striving for something and the suffocating pull of stagnancy. This chaotic structure bridges the warnings and epiphanic thoughts of 20th-century thinkers with the lives of today's dreamers.

We film buffs grew up worshiping Jean Cocteau—particularly his BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, ORPHEUS and BLOOD OF A POET—but in recent years he has perhaps ebbed from our consciousness.

Portrait of Charles Trenet. Twenty years after his death, this documentary offers a new look at the artist. When, in 1956, the singer appeared on television, he was 43 years old. And it is a man of 60 or even 70 years old that today's audience has known. The first Charles Trenet, the one who transported France when he was 25 or 30 years old, remains largely unknown. Yet it was this kid of genius who, at the age of 25, invented French chanson. But the archives that are scattered throughout this portrait also show that he invented a certain idea of joy. For joy in Trenet was a sport, a daily gymnastics.

A documentary view of the galas of Paris’s Palais Garnier in the 1950s and ’60s.

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.

In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.

French artist Jean Cocteau's multifaceted work across poetry, plays, paintings and film made him one of the leading creative figures of the Parisian avant-garde movement. Featuring Cocteau's own writings read by actor Timothée Chalamet, explore the dream-like quality of Cocteau's one of a kind oeuvre.

A look at the life and art of Ms. Iran Darroudi, one of the most important contemporary Iranian painters, who has divided her time between Tehran and Paris for the past fifty years. The film describes the various influences in her life and how she came to cultivate a style that merges the western surrealism with eastern mysticism

This revealing documentary from director Philippe Kohly examines the storied life of renowned soprano Maria Callas, from her troubled childhood in New York City to her scandal-laden but triumphant international career in opera. Featuring archival interviews with Callas herself and footage of contemporaries such as her lover Aristotle Onassis, this celebration of "La Divina" pays tribute to her enduring legacy some three decades after her death.

Commissioned to mark the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, "To Each His Own Cinema" brought together 33 of the world's pre-eminent filmmakers to produce short pieces exploring the multifarious facets of cinema and their perspective on the state of their chosen artform in the early 21st century.