Content from Bonne Compagnie

As her grandmother suffers from Alzheimer's, the filmmaker asks her grandfather about the darker side of their family history in this very personal story.

Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) did not seem destined for a life as an artist. Born in 1865 as the daughter of a single washerwoman and mother herself at the age of 18 - to the future painter Maurice Utrillo - her fate could have been sealed. But Valadon broke with the conventions of her time in order to follow her artistic creative urge. The Centre Pompidou in Paris paid tribute to the artist's work with an exhibition in 2023, which traces her special life and extraordinary modernity in a film documentary. Archive material, interviews and animations provide an insight into her career, which is characterized by encounters and friendships with other great artists of her time.

In five parts, this documentary tells the story of the colonisation of the French Overseas Territories. Slave descendants, coloniser descendants, historians, admirals, rebellious writers and politicians recount a lasting past that keeps on igniting the economic and social relations of these territories even to this day.