French movies about art

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), man of the people, autodidact and revolutionary sculptor - the most brilliant of his era. At 42, Rodin meets Camille Claudel, a young woman desperate to become his assistant. He quickly acknowledges her as his most able pupil, and treats her as an equal in matters of creation.

They loved each other with the ardor of thirteen-year-old boys. Rebellion and curiosity, hopes and doubts, girls and dreams of glory – they shared it all. Paul was rich, Emile poor. They went skinny-dipping, drank absinthe, starved, only to overeat. Sketched models by day, caressed them by night... Now, Paul is a painter and Emile a writer. Glory has passed Paul by. But Emile has it all: fame, money, the perfect wife, whom Paul once loved. They judge each other, admire each other, confront each other. They lose touch, meet up again, like a couple who cannot stop loving each other.

Young Violetta and her mother Hannah are a peculiar couple. Ten-year-old Violetta lives a quiet life with her grandmother, while her mother Hannah is an unpredictable photographer who lives off of the generosity of others. When Hannah forces her daughter to pose as a model, Violetta finds her life with her loving grandmother turned upside down.The resulting pictures quickly become a sensation for the trendy 70's Paris art scene, and Violetta finds herself caught in between her new stature as an art muse and her dull childhood.

Under the pressure of his boss, a music producer decides to set up a group consisting of a rabbi, a priest and an imam to make them sing the living together. But the religious he recruits are far from being saints ...

Famed but tormented artist Vincent van Gogh spends his final years in Arles, France, painting masterworks of the natural world that surrounds him.

Master filmmaker Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark) transforms a portrait of the world-renowned museum into a magisterial, centuries-spanning reflection on the relation between art, culture and power.

Jep Gambardella has seduced his way through the lavish nightlife of Rome for decades, but after his 65th birthday and a shock from the past, Jep looks past the nightclubs and parties to find a timeless landscape of absurd, exquisite beauty.

On the rocky path to sobriety after a life-changing accident, John Callahan discovers the healing power of art, willing his injured hands into drawing hilarious, often controversial cartoons, which bring him a new lease on life.

It's late 17th century. The viola da gamba player Monsieur de Sainte Colombe comes home to find that his wife died while he was away. In his grief he builds a small house in his garden into wich he moves to dedicate his life to music and his two young daughters Madeleine and Toinette, avoiding the outside world. Rumor about him and his music is widespread, and even reaches to the court of Louis XIV, who wants him at his court in Lully's orchestra, but Monsieur de Sainte Colombe refuses. One day a young man, Marin Marais, comes to see him with a request, he wants to be taught how to play the violin.

The life of Camille Claudel, a french sculptor who becomes the apprentice of Auguste Rodin and later his lover. Her passion for her art and Rodin drive her further away from reason and rationality.

A passionate love story set against a backdrop of sexual freedom, loosely based on the relationship between 19th century authors Pierre Louÿs and Marie de Régnier

New York designer Stefan Sagmeister lives in the city of his dreams, and creates work for the likes of the Rolling Stones and Jay-Z. Business is good, creative juices are flowing, and yet he suspects there must be more to life. Sagmeister takes on the daunting project of changing his personality by trying to figure out the causes of happiness. On the advice of a trusted psychologist Sagmeister experiments with three different approaches: meditation, therapy, and drugs. The Happy Film follows his pursuit, and all that he encounters along the way: joy, ecstasy, heartbreak, change, love, and death.

Guillaume Canet is told by a young co-star that he's no longer Rock'n' Roll and can't sell films anymore. He then tries to prove her wrong and gets help from his girlfriend, Marion Cotillard.

Alain, a successful Parisian publisher struggling to adapt to the digital revolution, has major doubts about the new manuscript of Léonard, one of his long-time authors - another work of auto-fiction recycling his love affair with a minor celebrity. Selena, Alain’s wife, a famous stage actress, is of the opposite opinion.

Werner Herzog gains exclusive access to film inside the Chauvet caves of Southern France, capturing the oldest known pictorial creations of humankind in their astonishing natural setting.

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

During the last forty years, the photographer Sebastião Salgado has been travelling through the continents, in the footsteps of an ever changing humanity. He has witnessed the major events of our recent history ; international conflicts, starvations and exodus… He is now embarking on the discovery of pristine territories, of the wild fauna and flora, of grandiose landscapes : a huge photographic project which is a tribute to the planet's beauty. Sebastião's Salgado's life and work are revealed to us by his son, Juliano, who went with him during his last journeys, and by Wim Wenders, a photographer himself.

Salvador Mallo, a filmmaker in the twilight of his career, remembers his life: his mother, his lovers, the actors he worked with. The sixties in a small village in Valencia, the eighties in Madrid, the present, when he feels an immeasurable emptiness, facing his mortality, the incapability of continuing filming, the impossibility of separating creation from his own life. The need of narrating his past can be his salvation.

Jean-Luc Godard's poetic meditation on war, violence and defeat. The film is structured in three parts. The three segments are "Hell", "Purgatory", and "Heaven". The first segment is a montage of war images from documentary and fictional sources. The second concerns two young Jewish women attending a European arts conference in Sarajevo. The final segment concerns the after life.

Winter, 1915. Confined by her family to an asylum in the South of France - where she will never sculpt again - the chronicle of Camille Claudel's reclusive life, as she waits for a visit from her brother, Paul Claudel.

Pina is a feature-length dance film in 3D with the ensemble of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, featuring the unique and inspiring art of the great German choreographer, who died in the summer of 2009.

After his friend, a hot young artist, is killed, a resourceful American man living in London covers up the crime and tries to keep the friend's name alive in order to exploit his legacy and reap millions in the process.

Rithy Panh uses clay figures, archival footage, and his narration to recreate the atrocities Cambodia's Khmer Rouge committed between 1975 and 1979.

Paris 1913. Coco Chanel is infatuated with the rich and handsome Boy Capel, but she is also compelled by her work. Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is about to be performed. The revolutionary dissonances of Igor's work parallel Coco's radical ideas. She wants to democratize women's fashion; he wants to redefine musical taste. Coco attends the scandalous first performance of The Rite in a chic white dress. The music and ballet are criticized as too modern, too foreign. Coco is moved but Igor is inconsolable.

Two years after a burn-out, Duval is still unemployed. Contacted by an enigmatic businessman, he is offered a simple and well-paid job: transcribing telephone tapping. Duval accepts financially without questioning the purpose of the organization that employs him. Precipitated at the heart of a political plot, he must face the brutal mechanics of the underground world of the secret services.

Banksy is a household name, but behind this name hides a multitude of stories, artworks, stunts, political statements and identities, leading to one of the art world's biggest unanswered questions- who is Banksy?

Depardieu plays an unnamed hunter and we join him and his dog as they depart for a nearby forest to snare some rabbits - or perhaps he's hunting for something far more elusive? His excursion soon progresses from carefree meandering to a palpable sense of placelessness and it doesn't take long before the hunter's dog disappears and he finds himself lost.

Brussels, early '60s. Alice and Céline live in twin bourgeois houses. They are best friends as are their children, Theo and Maxime, who have grown up like brothers. Both families spend all their time together. This perfect harmony is broken when an accident creates strong divisions between the two families.

The whole Bélier family is deaf, except for sixteen year old Paula who is the important translator in her parents' day to day life especially when it comes to matters concerning the family farm. When her music teacher discovers she has a fantastic singing voice and she gets an opportunity to enter a big Radio France contest the whole family's future is set up for big changes.

With only 12 percent of its pupils obtaining their baccalaureate, Jules Ferry High School is the worst school in France. The Inspector of Schools has already exhausted all the conventional means to raise standards at the school and he has no choice but to take the advice of his deputy. It is a case of having to fight fire with fire: the worst pupils must be taught by the worst teachers...

A middle-aged writer is looking for a quiet retreat; a slightly younger female estate agent gives him details of a house a close to Venice.

Armand and Leila, students at Science Po, are a young couple. They plan to go to New York to do their internship at the United Nations. But when Mahmoud, Leila's big brother, returns from a long stay in Yemen, which radically transformed him, he is opposed to his sister's love relationship and decides to remove him at any cost from Armand. To enter Mahmoud and see again Leila, Armand has no choice: he must slip the integral veil! The next day, a certain Scheherazade with a veiled face rings at the door of Leila, and she will not leave Mahmoud indifferent ...

A young woman begins a new life at the Apollonide bordello, a high-class brothel in Paris.

Simon, a young German doctor who lives and works in Marseille, goes missing. His appartment is empty. His mother Valérie is desperate. She doesn't understand the reason of his disappearance. Therefore she asks Jens, Simon's former boyfriend, to come to Marseille and help her find him.

After the death of his mother, Elisa (Claire Borotra) is responsible for custody of her sister Audrey (Penelope Leveque), a troubled teen and something he hardly knows. Following the last will of her mother, both go to Mont Saint Michel, where the two grew up, to spread his ashes. The second night of stay, and after a flood, Audrey disappears while the mayor's daughter, which suggests a voluntary escape, but Elisa does not think so, so it will not stop until its trace sister.

During World War I, a home care nurse treats a man who lost one leg on the front lines. A strong bond arises between them and evolves into a passionate love affair.

A police officer who's transfered in the police of Marseille gets assigned to take down a group of Italian robbers who drive the powerfull Ferrari's with the older niece of Daniel, a terrible driver who gets the legendary white taxi.

An ageing punk-with-a-dog and his brother the conformist decide to get their revenge on a shopping mall. Directing duo Benoit Delepine and Gustave Kervern, longstanding comic crusaders against capitalism, again set out to surprise and shock the bourgeois audience.

Jorge de Sena was forced to leave his country. First he moved to Brazil, and later to the USA. He never returned to Portugal. During his 20-year-long exile, he kept an epistolary correspondence with Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. These letters are a testimony of the profound friendship between the two poets, letters of longing and of desire to “fill years of distance with hours of conversation”. Through excerpts and verses, a dialog is established, revealing their divergent opinions but mostly their strong bond, and their efforts to preserve it until their last breaths.

We don't have an overview translated in English. Help us expand our database by adding one.

Put in charge of his young son, Ali leaves Belgium for Antibes to live with his sister and her husband as a family. Ali's bond with Stephanie, a killer whale trainer, grows deeper after Stephanie suffers a horrible accident.

An illiterate and lonely man bonds with an older and well-read woman.

When police is about to apprehend a famous gang of bank robbers, an elite sniper opens fire from a roof, thus facilitating the flee of his accomplices. However, one of them is seriously injured, which compromises the plans of the thieves.

1967-1976. As one of history's greatest fashion designers entered a decade of freedom, neither came out of it in one piece.

A woman has disappeared. The day after a snowstorm, her car is found on a road leading to a plateau with with nothing but a few scattered farms. The gendarmes have nothing to go on, while five individuals well know they have something to do with the woman's disappearance. They all keep their secrets to themselves, but no one suspects that the whole story began far from these windswept wintry peaks: on another continent, in the burning sun, where poverty doesn't stop desire from taking the law into its own hands.

Diane is a well-known lawyer, divorced for three years. She loses her mobile telephone and receives a call from the person who finds it. That person is Alexandre, a charming man and the perfect gentleman. They make a connection over the phone and agree to meet up the following day. But when Alexandre arrives, there's a surprise in store when Diane discovers he is only 4' 6" tall. From that moment on, Diane tries to overcome the prejudices of society and her own fears to experience the best time of her life...

In November 2009, French security van driver Toni Musulin makes off with nearly 12 million euros, then turns himself over to the authorities a week later.

Mathias Gold is a down-on-his-luck New Yorker who inherits a Parisian apartment from his estranged father. But when he arrives in France to sell the vast domicile, he's shocked to discover a live-in tenant who is not prepared to budge. His apartment is a viager—an ancient French real estate system with complex rules pertaining to its resale—and the feisty Englishwoman Mathilde Girard, who has lived in the apartment with her daughter Chloé for many years, can by contract collect monthly payments from Mathias until her death.

Adèle's life is changed when she meets Emma, a young woman with blue hair, who will allow her to discover desire, to assert herself as a woman and as an adult. In front of others, Adele grows, seeks herself, loses herself, finds herself.

Nothing in her background destined Loïe Fuller from the American Midwest to become a Belle Epoque icon, even less a dancer at the Paris Opera. Even at the risk of destroying her back and burning her eyes with the stage lights, she will never falter in the quest to perfect her dance. But her encounter with Isadora Duncan, a prodigious young dancer hungry for fame and glory, will precipitate the fall of this icon at the beginning of the twentieth century.