The Song of the Butterflies

Basquiat: Rage to Riches

October 2017 •English

This film tells Jean-Michel's story through exclusive interviews with his two sisters Lisane and Jeanine, who have never before agreed to be interviewed for a TV documentary. With striking candour, Basquiat's art dealers - including Larry Gagosian, Mary Boone and Bruno Bischofberger - as well as his most intimate friends, lovers and fellow artists, expose the cash, the drugs and the pernicious racism which Basquiat confronted on a daily basis. As historical tableaux, visual diaries of defiance or surfaces covered with hidden meanings, Basquiat's art remains the beating heart of this story.

The Great Ordinary Movie

February 1971 •French

The Ordinary Grand Film is the result of love at first sight with The Ordinary Grand Circus. With film and equipment borrowed from left and right, with the free complicity of all those who appear in the credits, they went on weekends to film a few moments of their tour.

Piripkura

March 2018 •Portuguese

The last two surviving members of the Piripkura people, a nomadic tribe in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, struggle to maintain their indigenous way of life amidst the region's massive deforestation. Living deep in the rainforest, Pakyî and Tamandua live off the land relying on a machete, an ax, and a torch lit in 1998.

Constable: A Country Rebel

September 2014 •English

The Haywain by John Constable is such a comfortingly familiar image of rural Britain that it is difficult to believe it was ever regarded as a revolutionary painting, but in this film, made in conjunction with a landmark exhibition at the V&A, Alastair Sooke discovers that Constable was painting in a way that was completely new and groundbreaking at the time. Through experimentation and innovation, he managed to make a sublime art from humble things and, though he struggled in his own country during his lifetime, his genius was surprisingly widely admired in France.

Praia da Saudade

January 2024 •Portuguese

A documentary about climate change in Brazil, especially at Atafona Beach (in the Campos de Goytacazes region), which is being swallowed up by the sea. Narrated by Sonia Guajajara and Sidarta Ribeiro, the film deals with the genocide of the native people of Goytacazes.

Philippe-Alain Michaud, le réel traversé par la fiction

January 2016 •French

To be in Venice and see the architecture of New York, to perceive in a painting by Tintoretto the birth of animated images, to look at the burlesque Cretinetti as the ancestor of montage - so many shifts, displacements, and striking telescopings that Philippe-Alain Michaud proposes in this film dedicated to him. To follow this art historian, curator of the cinema collections at the Centre Pompidou, is to go from the oriental carpet to the film, or from the first fireworks to the cinema. And everywhere the animation of the images - projections of Antony McCall, or of Paul Sharits, Column without end of Brancusi, Pasolini's Accatone - everything moves! Under the tutelage of Aby Warburg, the great art historian of the early twentieth century, precursor of iconology and image comparison, to whom Philippe-Alain Michaud was the first in France to devote an important essay, eleven images are placed on the table to describe the singular journey of this art historian.

The Genius of Leonardo Da Vinci

April 2018 •English

Janina Ramirez explores the BBC archives to create a TV history of Leonardo Da Vinci, discovering what lies beneath the Mona Lisa and even how he acquired his anatomical knowledge.

Manet: Portraying Life

April 2013 •English

Manet’s portraits are rarely afforded such close attention as they are given in this exquisitely crafted and insightful film presented by art expert Tim Marlow. Manet’s portraiture comprised about half his work, giving life on canvas to family, friends and the literary, political and artistic figures of the day.

Pierre Bonnard : les couleurs de l'intime

January 2015 •French

How did Bonnard, one of the great masters of 20th-century painting, a secretive, anxious man with an ordinary everyday life, become this undisputed painter of intimacy, capable of transforming reality into a unique and incandescent world? Through his paintings, but also his private journals, his correspondence with Matisse and Vuillard, the photographs he loved, and the places where he lived, the film immerses us in the world of this master of color.

On the Divide

June 2021 •English

Brings us into the lives of three Latinx people in McAllen Texas, whose different beliefs end up coming to a head at the last abortion clinic in the US/Mexico border.

Plains: Testimony of an Ethnocide

June 1971 •English

A documentary on the massacre of Planas in the Colombian east plains in 1970. An Indigenous community formed a cooperative to defend their rights from settlers and colonists, but the government organized a military operation to protect the latter and foreign companies.

Falas da Terra

April 2021 •Portuguese

'Falas da Terra' sheds light on the plurality and the struggle of the indigenous people for the right to exist, in a historical rescue of valuing their cultures.

Faces Places

June 2017 •French

Director Agnès Varda and photographer/muralist JR journey through rural France and form an unlikely friendship.

Sarcophagus for a Queen

September 2019 •Czech

Bjørn Nørgaard and a team of Czech glass artists in the demanding process of creating a grave monument for Queen Margrethe and Prince Henrik of Denmark.

Odvaha

July 2016 •Czech

Gerhard Richter: 4 Decades

February 2005 •English

Curator Robert Storr takes us through the 2002 MoMA Gerhard Richter retrospective.

Inhabitants

March 2021 •English

For millennia, Native Americans successfully stewarded and shaped their landscapes, but centuries of colonization have disrupted their ability to maintain their traditional land management practices. From deserts, coastlines, forests, mountains, and prairies, Native communities across the US are restoring their ancient relationships with the land. As the climate crisis escalates these time-tested practices of North America's original inhabitants are becoming increasingly essential in a rapidly changing world.

Rafael França: obra como testamento

November 2001 •Portuguese

Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box

November 1991 •English

This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose Hobart. In this film we get to hear people like Susan Sontag, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Curtis talk about their friendships with the artist. It turns out that Curtis was quite a collector and he seemed to have a very deep understanding of what Cornell was doing in his work.

Cindy Sherman: Nobody's Here But Me

January 1994 •English

New York based artist, Cindy Sherman, is famous for her photographs of women in which she is not only the photographer, but also the subject. She has contributed her own footage to the programme by recording her studio and herself at work with her Hi-8 video camera. It reveals a range of unexpected sources from visceral horror to medical catalogues and exploitation movies, and explores her real interests and enthusiasms. She shows an intuitive and often humorous approach to her work, and reflects on the themes of her work since the late 1970s. She talks about her pivotal series known as the `Sex Pictures' in which she addresses the theme of sexuality in the light of AIDS and the arts censorship debate in the United States.