Content from Roche Productions

In his early days as an actor, Marlon Brando (1924-2004) was a shy young man with theatrical ambitions, like many others; but his charisma and superb acting skills made him truly unique, so that the doors to the starry sky of Hollywood opened for him. However, his peculiar manners, political commitment and complicated love life always overshadowed his artistic success.

Jean Rochefort, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Philippe Noiret - This is the story of a bunch of friends. Comedian buddies. Actors who dreamed of the Conservatory and the National Theater of Paris. The theater was their ideal, cinema will be their paradise. Their friend Jean-Paul Belmondo, the relaxed Parisian, who failed the entrance exam, will make sparks fly. Rochefort, Marielle and Noiret, the three provincials, will climb the steps of recognition one by one. From the little cabarets on the Left Bank to the TV shows of the Buttes-Chaumont pioneers. From the second roles to the first and from the B movies to the classics.

A new look at the public and private life of one of the most important statesmen in the history of Europe: Winston Churchill (1874-1965), soldier, politician, writer, painter, leader of his country in the darkest hours, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, a myth, a giant of the 20th century.

Barbra Streisand grew up in working class Brooklyn, dreaming of escape from her tough childhood. A stellar student, she resisted the pressure to go to college as her sights were firmly set on Broadway. She was determined to become an actress and landed her first role aged 16, but it was two years later, when she started to sing, that her career took off. Subverting stereotypes and breaking glass ceilings, this programme looks at her rise to stardom and the remarkable achievements of her early career.

Summer 1936 - The Berlin Olympics, organized by the Nazi regime on the eve of World War II, acted as a grand showcase for a Germany that was athletic, peaceful and rejuvenated. The violence and hate that until then had reigned in the streets of Berlin suddenly vanished. Adolf Hitler became the triumphant host of European countries he would soon try to invade or face in a deadly global conflict.

January 1953: On the eve of his death Stalin finds himself yet another imaginary enemy: Jewish doctors. He organizes the most violent anti-Semitic campaign ever launched in the USSR, by fabricating the "Doctors' Plot," whereby doctors are charged with conspiring to murder the highest dignitaries of the Soviet Regime. Still unknown and untold, this conspiracy underlines the climax of a political scheme successfully masterminded by Stalin to turn the Jews into the new enemies of the people. It reveals his extreme paranoia and his compulsion to manipulate those around him. The children and friends of the main victims recount for the first time their experience and their distress related to these nightmarish events.

A documentary portrait of legendary Perfect Ten gymnast Nadia Comaneci after becoming an icon in the 1976 Olympics, during her Romanian period, and her challenging years under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu.

From 1989 to 1991 a string of unpredictable events happened that brought to light the rivalry between two men: Gorbachev, hindered by the economic results of his perestroika, and Yeltsin, embodying the hopes of the Russian people. Illustrated with interviews of top protagonists such as Mikhail Gobachev himself, the documentary recounts the critical last two years of the former USSR.

He loved power and influence. The socialist left his mark on France and Europe. For 14 years - from 1981 to 1995 - François Mitterrand held the reins of the "Grande Nation" at the Elysée Palace in Paris. What remains of Mitterrand today? What remains of the reign of the first socialist president of the Fifth Republic?

Between June 1940 and March 1943, the 1,200 kilometer long demarcation line broke France in two. For almost three years she controlled the daily newspaper of 40 million French people. In the north the zone occupied by Hitler's soldiers, in the south the zone administered by Marshal Pétain's Vichy regime. This film lifts the veil in this theater on the shameful mistakes of the collaboration, but also on the most courageous and noble deeds. Archive images and film recordings at places where the border used to be crossed are alternated with interviews with the last witnesses of this time.

The untold story of a world-renowned place of remembrance of the Holocaust in France, the internment camp of Drancy, which was the central transit for the near totality of the 76 000 deported Jews of France during World War II.

Interwoven portraits of Anatoli Karpov and Garry Kasparov, whose 25-year bitter rivalry accompanied the fall of the USSR. The story of a duel between two chess giants, fighting a personal war in a world gone to ruin. This battle of black and white was more than a face-off over a chessboard. Part psychological drama, part political thriller, the film brings to life their hostilities, nested like Russian dolls. Karpov vs. Kasparov represents the battle between the faltering empire and the young liberals several steps ahead of the game, checkmating the old guard. Or how two stories – the societal one and the personal one – started out separately and ended up superimposed, twining together into one tale.

In 1942, more than 8,000 Jews were arrested on 16 and 17 July and sent to the Vélodrome d'Hiver sports center in the 15th district, a stone's throw from the Eiffel Tower, before being deported. The expression "Vel d'Hiv round-up" has become part of our collective memory, to the point of becoming the main memorial reference point for France during the dark years. Based on research carried out in unpublished or rarely explored archives, this film retraces the history of this roundup as experienced by hunted Jews and police trackers, from its planning in the Vichy offices to its hour-by-hour unfolding in the streets of Paris.

Join sociologists Monique and Michel Pinçon-Charlot on their “investigation” of the French aristocracy and gentry. An entertaining and instructive movie on an exclusive and highly secretive world.

Like nobody else Jean-Pierre Melville influenced modern filmmaking. This documentary follows his creative process step by step, showing him becoming the father of the Nouvelle Vague and one of the most iconic directors of French cinema.

Isabelle Huppert is one of the most famous French actresses. In this portrait she reflects in voice over on her movies and her craft. She seems to like characters that are neurotic, dramatic and even dangerous. Huppert considers every character a means to discover things about herself.

Toni Morrison (1931-2019), first black woman writer being awarded the Nobel Prize of Literature, was a critic, a book editor, a college professor, and a creative author of novels, poems and essays. She claimed the invention of a black writing and brought the light on what had kept silenced since the days of the birth of the United States of America as an independent nation: the black people history.

These are the stories of those who lived through Hitler's Germany. They are the lucky who survived to tell their stories, whether they were persecuted Jews or the Reich's harassed opeposition. Told only with archival documents, this series is a deeply moving account of Germany and the Third Reich through the eyes of the oppressed, as they watched their country as it was crushed by dictatorship.

Since its birth in 1865, in the wake of the American Civil War, the history of the Ku Klux Klan has been inseparable from that of the United States. The debates over slavery, the populism in the roaring twenties, the struggle for civil rights in the sixties, the rise of the far-right in the early 21st century; the Klan seems to have always embodied the dark side of the nation, with its gray areas and blind spots.

How did the Soviet Union impose its communist ideology on the countries of Central and Eastern Europe after World War II? The story of how, from 1945 until the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, these countries were gradually subjected to the totalitarian Soviet yoke.

November 1947. The United Nations votes the partition plan for Palestine. For some, it is a dream becoming reality; for others, it is the beginning of a catastrophe. Seventy years after this historic vote, the land of Palestine remains an open wound, a battleground for two peoples torn apart by their shared history, a source of inextricable tension in the region and even beyond the borders of the Middle East.