Histoire TV

Paris, 1940. German occupation forces create a new film production company, Continental, and put Alfred Greven – producer, cinephile, and opportunistic businessman – in charge. During the occupation, under Joseph Goebbels’s orders, Greven hires the best artists and technicians of French cinema to produce successful, highly entertaining films, which are also strategically devoid of propaganda. Simultaneously, he takes advantage of the confiscation of Jewish property to purchase film theaters, studios and laboratories, in order to control the whole production line. His goal: to create a European Hollywood. Among the thirty feature films thus produced under the auspices of Continental, several are, to this day, considered classics of French cinema.

From her personal experience, Marie Labory sets out on the trail of the lesbians who lived in Europe in the twentieth century. One hundred years of fighting for freedom, told through archives and testimonies.

In 1945, two young American soldiers, brothers Budd and Stuart Schulberg, are commissioned to collect filmed and recorded evidence of the horrors committed by the infamous Third Reich in order to prove Nazi war crimes during the Nuremberg trials (1945-46). The story of the making of Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, a paramount historic documentary, released in 1948.

The story of the cross destiny of George Orwell (1903-50) and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), the genius authors of the two most groundbreaking novels of anticipation of the 20th century: 1984 and Brave New World; two lucid witnesses of the maledictions of the modern world whose novels have found a considerable echo with our time.

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 Vatican opened once-secret records on Pope Pius XII on March 2020. This gave researchers a brand new insight into the Catholic Church during the Nazi era. What did the Pope know about the Holocaust?

Did Leonardo da Vinci come up with all of his ideas and inventions by himself or did he also borrow some of them from ancient scientists including those who lived 1,700 years before him.

Between the end of the Second World War and the abolition of the "offence of homosexuality" in 1982, 10,000 sentences were handed down in France. Sentences in correctional courts, fines and sometimes imprisonment, the convictions were mainly against men. The last witnesses of this period speak out and tell of four decades of clandestine life, just before the tragedy of AIDS.

In June 1940 nothing was written. The appeal of June 18 by General de Gaulle was a hope but also a start. The start for an essential page of the History of France, written by De Gaulle and his followers, without whom nothing would have existed in the Resistance to the German tyranny and this film wishes to honor their memory.

Fifty years ago, on Sunday, 2 March 1969, Concorde flew for the first time. Starting from this inaugural flight, the film goes back in time to the origin of the conception of Concorde.

Paris, 1954. The story of the meeting, known thanks to the fortuitous discovery of a forgotten notebook, full of notes and photographs, between a white British aristocrat, Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, writer and jazz patron, and a talented black pianist, Thelonious Monk, one of the best bebop jazz musicians of all time; a prodigious union of wills that overcame the most extreme prejudices of the very conservative US society.

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!

In 1892, Ellis Island, in New York Bay, became the main gateway to the United States for immigrants arriving increasingly from Europe. The story of immigration to the United States from 1892 to 1954, an enthralling polyphonic narrative that embraces both small and great history.