Thierry Frémaux

Looks at the glamour, red carpets, movies, craziness, stunts, deals, parties and personalities that have been part of the Cannes Film Festival over eight decades, as well as looking to the future.

A collection of restored prints from the Lumière Brothers.

SEDUCED AND ABANDONED combines acting legend Alec Baldwin with director James Toback as they lead us on a troublesome and often hilarious journey of raising financing for their next feature film. Moving from director to financier to star actor, the two players provide us with a unique look behind the curtain at the world's biggest and most glamourous film festival, shining a light on the bitter-sweet relationship filmmakers have with Cannes and the film business. Featuring insights from directors Martin Scorsese, 'Bernando Bertolucci' and Roman Polanski; actors Ryan Gosling and Jessica Chastain and a host of film distribution luminaries.

A portrait of French filmmaker Michel Gondry, creator, for three decades, of an imperfect, astonishing, fascinating, damaged and poetic work.

In one of those wonderful coincidences of history, lumière, the French word for “light,” was also the last name of brothers Auguste and Louis, whose brilliant invention, the cinematograph, helped to inaugurate the most beloved art form of the last 130 years. Institute Lumière director Thierry Frémaux uses Lumière, Le Cinema! to guide the viewer through over a hundred shorts—some famous, some forgotten, some never before seen—directed by Lumière and company. In the process, Frémaux illuminates how the brothers employed the camera as a creative instrument as they (and their operators) mastered framing, staging, and subject selection for quotidian and exotic microdocumentaries as well as the first ever fictional motion pictures. The result is not only a glorious re(telling) of the genesis of cinema but a profound meditation on the beautiful world captured—and the mysterious world imagined—by the Lumières.

Two intertwined families who have made half a century of cinema. La Grande Bouffe, We won’t grow old together, Tchao Pantin, Apocalypse Now, Bienvenue Chez les Ch’tis, The Artist. At the center of this family, an unknown to the general public: Paul Rassam. His brother and his brother-in-law are more famous: the sulphurous Jean-Pierre Rassam and Claude Berri. It is a story peppered with drama, and today, a new generation has taken over. Thomas Langmann – son of Claude Berri – and Dimitri Rassam, son of Carole Bouquet and Jean-Pierre Rassam.

Documentary showing one day of work of over 90 actors and filmmakers from French cinema on the same day. On 27 March 2002, 27 teams filmed actors, directors, producers and technicians at work, from Hawaii to Paris and from New York to Lisbon.

Actors Anne Dorval, Suzanne Clément, Monia Chokri, Gaspard Ulliel, Vincent Cassel, Niels Schneider and Melvil Poupaud discuss working with the young Canadian director Xavier Dolan, who has conquered the hearts of both cinema lovers and prestigious festival juries with his films. To French actress Nathalie Baye, he seems very experienced despite his young age, while Cannes Director Thierry Frémaux says he may be insolent, but everyone agrees he is passionate, creative, a perfectionist and... in a hurry.

At 80 years old, German director and photographer Wim Wenders talks about his unwavering joy in creating and telling stories. From "Paris, Texas" to "Perfect Days" and "Wings of Desire," this is a tender and luminous portrait of the most European of filmmakers.

Throughout the 19th century, imaginative and visionary artists and inventors brought about the advent of a new look, absolutely modern and truly cinematographic, long before the revolutionary invention of the Lumière brothers and the arrival of December 28, 1895, the historic day on which the first cinema performance took place.

To help Francis Hallé in his fight to save the last tropical forests, a documentary filmmaker with a passion for nature decides to make his first film: "The Botanist", an ecological thriller with Leonardo DiCaprio. He traces his path with malice, obstinacy, and discovers, with candor, the arcana of the seventh art. Even if he never gives up, will his film ever exist?

A complete and never-before-seen portrait of the life of a young girl from Pula (Istria) who quickly became one of the most famous and beloved actresses of Italian and international cinema, told through the words of her unpublished letters and diaries, photographs, homemade films in 8 mm, and new interviews with her relatives, friends, and collaborators.

Illustrated by numerous archives and unpublished testimonies in France, this documentary traces the progress of the aborted edition of the Cannes Festival in 1968.

Sergio Castellitto's narration traces the history of 3D cinema, which began with cinema itself, through films from the early 1900s such as "L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat" by the Lumière brothers, to the great titles of the 1950s such as Alfred Hitchcock's "Dial M for Murder" and "The Creature from the Black Lagoon."