Camera Lucida Productions

10-year-old Ellie is fascinated by nature and birds, she spends her time reading about them. One day, a few miles from school, she goes onto a little island on the Loire River to take a bird book back to the library. It's an island full of birds.

In 1965 Ingmar Bergman filmed “Persona”, the cult film that brought together all of the Swedish filmmaker’s obsessions and became a turning point in his career.

Man has always sought to seek further afield. After the seafaring explorers of the 16th century, 21st century cosmologists today navigate more celestial oceans, with each mission providing an ever-broader and more impressive cartography of our surroundings. At the avant garde of modern technology, these strange travellers are actually immobile, and their vessels are powerful and spectacular telescopes, on the Earth or in space, constantly widening the limits of our knowledge and giving form to our dreams of infinity. From Hawaii to Australia, via South Africa and China, we set out on an incredible scientific and human adventure to visit the planet's greatest cosmic exploration centres to discover the new challenges involved in understanding the universe. A journey on Earth and in the heavens that will take your breath away!

The prodigious genesis of a monument of world literature, too often reduced to its popular success, also recounts the tormented conversion of its author, Victor Hugo, to the ideal of social progress.

How only one man all at the same time painted the Mona Lisa, conceived ball bearing and gave the first clinical description of atherosclerosis? On the occasion of the 500th anniversary of his death, this documentary will answer these questions and much more, gathering clues thanks to research on the field and encounters with the most outstanding specialists on Leonardo Da Vinci. Travelling through time thanks to an imaginary museum, we will track back the Renaissance genius and give you to see Leonardo’s relentless ingenuity!

Is a spectacular journey across 4 billion years of evolution exploring how the Moon has been essential in setting up the pace to create life on Earth and how it has been a source of inspiration and fascination for men ever since

Go inside the building that has been the source of some of the greatest moments in music, ballet and opera.

Music - Making full use of Drottningholm Theatre's unique 18th-century baroque theatre machinery, as well as his deep creative understanding of the profound drama of the work, stage director Pierre Audi creates a production of ZOROASTRE that completely accords with the spirit of Rameau. True to the form of the tragedie lyrique, choreographer Amir Hosseinpour's dances perfectly match the weight and meaning of both plot and music. The ensemble, Les Talens Lyriques, reinforced with musicians from the Drottningholm Court Theatre Orchestra and Chorus, is expertly and passionately led into the musical stratosphere by musical director Christophe Rousset. This intensely dramatic production is captured live in vibrant High Definition video and true surround sound. - Anders J. Dahlin, Evgueniy Alexiev, Sine Bundgaard

Elliott Erwitt has spent his entire adult life taking photographs, of presidents, popes and movie stars, as well as regular people and their pets. His work is iconic in world culture while his life is largely unknown.

Accompanied by a child, the mathematician Galileo observes the firmament with a telescope. Ten years ago, the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned in Rome for having supported the idea of an infinite and centerless universe, based on the work of Copernicus. By dint of observations and calculations, Galileo seeks proofs for his hypothesis of a cosmic system where the Earth is "an ordinary celestial body, one among thousands". From Padua to Venice, the mathematician shakes certainties by confronting the power of a Church which wishes to maintain its absolute power in the "crystal spheres" where Ptolemy has hitherto locked up the world.

In the kingdom of music, different families of instruments live apart. One day, the string family heard about the saxophone family and they invited them over for a visit. The two families then decide to embark on a search of other instrument families. During their journey, other families start joining them and toghether they form a large orchestra.

In the fall of 2010, Bozon and co-conspirator Pascale Bodet commandeered the first floor of Paris’s famed Centre Pompidou for 10 days of screenings, lectures and performances that amounted to a counter-canonical history of French cinema. During the ensuing merriment (entitled Beaubourg, la dernière Major !) audience members were invited to observe the daily making of this film, directed by Bozon and written by Axelle Ropert, about an inexperienced young journalist (Laure Marsac) sent to the Pompidou to interview a maverick artistic impresario (Thomas Chabrol). The result is an unexpected love story that is also a record of this landmark exhibition, featuring cameos by Raul Ruiz, Paul Vecchiali, Luc Moullet and more !

At the end of 2013, the year that marked the 50th anniversary of Francis Poulenc’s death, his gripping and moving operatic masterpiece, Dialogues des Carmélites was staged in Paris by director Olivier Py with a cast featuring some of France’s finest female singers – Patricia Petitbon, Véronique Gens, Sandrine Piau and Sophie Koch – under the baton of Jérémie Rohrer. Le Figaro described the production as “a thing of wonder,” while Le Monde called it: “A masterpiece ... the most exciting and consummately achieved show to have been seen on a Parisian stage in a long time … This was great work, magisterial and unforgettable.” “The memorable Dialogues des Carmélites at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées marked the climax of commemorative activities for the 50th anniversary of Poulenc’s death,” wrote Opera magazine of the production of Poulenc’s gripping and moving opera that was staged by the French director Olivier Py in Paris in December 2013.

In February 1972, the American president Richard Nixon went to China to meet Mao Zedong. In the context of the war in Vietnam and the cold war, this encounter marked a turning point in Chinese‑American relations. John Adams, a major musical figure of the last forty years, made this event of contemporary history the subject of his first opera. Nixon in China tackles the political thaw instigated by ping-pong diplomacy, begun by the invitation of the American table tennis players by their Chinese counterparts, one year before the presidential visit. A mesmerising work in which the pulsations and repetitions typical of minimalism are combined with melodic lines of great lyricism. For its entry into the Paris Opera repertoire, this work has been entrusted to the director Valentina Carrasco, who underlines the importance and the mediating power of Chinese national sport in history.

Melody Gardot performs her new album Sunset in the Blue, from the Radio France studios accompanied by a trio of musicians and 40 instrumentalists from the in-house orchestra.

The 82-year-old Japanese Seiji Ozawa is one of the last remaining conductor legends of a golden era. Portrait of the ambitious maestro and educator who made the western repertoire really well known in Japan.