Storyville Season 2009
Regarder La Bande Annonce
Épisode guide de Storyville Saison 2009
Documentary based on Philippe Petit's autobiographical book To Reach the Clouds: My High Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers. In August 1974, French wire-walker Philippe Petit spent nearly an hour walking, dancing, kneeling and lying on a wire which he and his friends had strung in secret between the rooftops of New York's Twin Towers. Six years of intense planning, dreaming and physical training fell into place that morning. Already an accomplished wire-walker, Petit had caught sight of an article about the planned construction of the Twin Towers while in a dentist's waiting room in 1968, and at that moment an obsession was born. He spent every waking moment since that day plotting the details of his walk (which he called 'le coup') and gathered a team of people around him to assist in the planning.
Documentary, made by her great niece, about the British Jewish baroness who fell in love with the jazz genius Thelonious Monk. Pannonica Rothschild was born with everything, got married and had five children, but one track by a man she had never met inspired her to leave and start a new life in America. Helen Mirren is the voice of 'Nica', while Sonny Rollins, TS Monk Jr, the Duchess of Devonshire, Quincy Jones, Lord Rothschild, Roy Haynes, Chico Hamilton and others appear as themselves.
Qatar is said to be the world's richest country, while competitive debating is said to be a training ground for future world leaders. So when the Qatari Emiress charged two recent Oxford graduates with creating the country's first national debate team and taking them to the world championships, the stakes were high. This documentary follows the journey of five ambitious teenagers as they are initiated into the cut-throat subculture of competitive high school debate. Training in London, Doha and New York, they learn more about the world as they hone their debating skills.
Nati Baratz's documentary chronicles a former disciple's search for his reincarnated Tibetan master. After 26 years of isolated meditation in a mountain cave, Lama Konchog became one of the greatest Tibetan masters of our time. When he passed away in 2001 at 84, the Dalai Lama instructed his shy, devoted disciple Tenzin Zopa to search for his master's reincarnation. This 'unmistaken child' must be found within four years, before it becomes too difficult to remove him from his parents' care.
After 50 years, will the Jew accused of collaborating with the Nazis during the Holocaust be exonerated? How much should you negotiate with the enemy? In Israel, the debate over that question evoked fury to the point of assassination. Such was the case of Kasztner. Dr Israel (Rezso) Kasztner, a Hungarian Jew who tried to rescue the last million Jews of Europe by negotiating face to face with Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, was gunned down by another Jew who never set foot in Nazi Europe. After 50 years, his assassin Ze'ev Eckstein breaks his silence on the fateful night he shot and killed Kasztner.
D Carleton Gajdusek won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of Prions - the particles that would emerge as the cause of Mad Cow disease - while working with a cannibal tribe on New Guinea. He was a star of the scientific world. Over his years working amongst the tribes of the South Seas, he adopted 57 kids, bringing them to a new life in Washington DC. His adoptions were hailed as wonderful fatherly beneficence. But, at the height of his career, rumours began to spread he was a paedophile. Gajdusek would argue that if sex with children was okay in their own cultures, he wasn't wrong to join in. How could a great mind like Gajdusek's lose insight so totally, and why would the scientific community to which he was a hero be so quick to leap to his defence and dismiss the allegations?
Drama-documentary-animation hybrid starring Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite as a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055, watching archive footage from 2008 and asking why climate change wasn't stopped before it was too late.
J Robert Oppenheimer was one of the most celebrated scientists of his generation. Shy, arrogant and brilliant, he is best known as the man that led the Manhattan Project to spectacular success. As the years progressed he also grew into a scientific statesman, leading a government agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, which was trying to develop ways to avoid a nuclear arms race. His attempts at politics, though, were a lot less successful than his scientific endeavours. As he grew more powerful, he started to make serious enemies amongst the establishment, particularly a friend of President Truman's - Lewis Strauss.
A failed coup attempt ... a British mercenary in a grim African prison ... a dictator accused by the West of torture ... and beneath it all, a spectacular underwater oil reserve that the world's major powers would love to get their hands on. It may sound like the latest John LeCarre bestseller, but it's the real-life intrigue behind Simon Mann's African Coup, Storyville's penetrating look at mysterious goings on in Equatorial Guinea, a tiny West African nation newly rich from oil and infamous for corruption. Filmed over eighteen months, with access to key players, the film offers a unique look inside a country that rarely allows in the foreign press.
Filmmaker Michel Orion Scott captures a magical journey into a little-known world, in a documentary which chronicles Rupert Isaacson and Kristin Neff's personal odyssey to make sense of their child's autism, and find healing for him and themselves in the unlikeliest of places.
Nicky Haslam, renowned socialite, bon viveur, wit and best friend to all is also one of the world's most respected and highly paid interior designers, whose clients include royalty, rock stars and Russians. This documentary takes the viewer into a world to which few have access and most could hardly imagine, where apartments cost over 30 million pounds and people think nothing of spending four million to do up a house.
Documentary focusing on Section 60 of the historic Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia - the 'saddest acre in America' - where US service men and women from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts are buried. An intimate look at the impact of lives lost too soon, the film bears witness to the rituals and traditions of the family and friends who come from around the country to visit the graves.
People who work in the city either make money out of money, or from the proximity of money. But what do they feel about their jobs? In Men of the City, filmmaker Marc Isaacs goes behind the headlines to examine the state of mind and motivation of men in the city.
In September 2009, Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland on a 30-year-old warrant. In 1978, the filmmaker skipped bail and escaped to France. For decades, no-one truly understood why. This documentary that reveals the truth about the bungled legal proceedings which brought about his escape. In her riveting reopening of this controversial and, as it turns out, very complex case, filmmaker Marina Zenovich fashions a perceptive and intelligent exploration of what really happened and casts a very different light on Polanski's decision, as well as the workings of the American legal system. Revisiting all of the key players, including the lawyers, the victim and the media, the film looks at the conduct of the judge whose handling of the case was unusual. In addition, it incorporates insightful interviews from the present, bringing new comprehension and clarity to events long clouded by myths and presumptions.
When thinking of devastated cities in the Second World War, Naples is often forgotten, but when it was liberated by the Allies it was on its last legs, with 200,000 homeless and no power, transport, food or running water. The Allies quickly brought food to the starving population and medicine to the sick, but the introduction of many troops and lots of supplies led to the creation of a huge black market involving almost the entire population. One third of women became prostitutes as Naples became a kind of Sodom and Gomorrah, a city of vice, crime and chaos where everything that could be sold and stolen was sold and stolen. Perplexingly, the Americans decided to introduce Italo-American criminals into positions of power in southern Italy, such as Vito Genovese, a gangster escaping a murder rap in New York. Genovese began setting up a crime empire in Naples - after Mussolini had effectively suppressed organised crime in Italy, the Allies brought it back. When World War II ended, alarmed and surprised by Soviet support for the Italian communist parties, the Allies responded with their own propaganda. Combined with the Marshall Plan, this became a massive covert effort by the Americans to swing the elections towards the parties of the right. The Catholic Church helped them, with priests telling congregations that they would go to hell if they didn't vote Christian Democrat. After great political and ideological struggle in which the Cold War was waged by proxy for the first time, the 1948 elections were won by the Christian Democrats, a result that may not have been truly fair. The CIA were pleased with the result and partially credited it to their own operations. They recommended that the US should continue with the covert manipulation of political outcomes in fore
Detective Bechara Jahlk is the most famous private eye in Brazil, specialising in 'corporate crime' and employing a team of young female agents. This documentary follows the case brought to Jahlk's attention by a 68-year-old import-export entrepreneur, a divorced workaholic who suspects a link between his company and drug-trafficking in Rio's harbour and fears that his son Luiz might be involved. At 26 and loaded with cash, Luiz is a junior executive in his father's business and lives life in Rio's fast lane. Discretion is paramount, so Jahlk sends in his 'angels' Natasha, Julia and Tania, armed with sophisticated surveillance equipment, to infiltrate Luiz's social network and uncover any criminal activity. The agents quickly establish evidence of Luiz's drug use. In recorded conversations, some names pop up, giving the agents more leads to follow - Marcelo the drug courier, Claudio the drug dealer, former drug dealer-turned-agent Ze Carlos, right-wing extremist group the Integralistas and former torturer and policeman JC. The investigation takes the agents into the favelas, undercover in Rio's port, to nightclubs, restaurants, motels and Sao Paulo and back, giving insights into the case, Luiz's life and contemporary Brazilian society.
Set against the breathtaking backdrop of the Himalayas, this documentary follows the gripping adventure of six Tibetan teenagers on a climbing expedition up the 23,000 foot Lhakpa Ri, on the north side of Everest. A dangerous journey soon becomes a seemingly impossible challenge made all the more remarkable by the fact that the teenagers are blind. Believed by many Tibetans to be possessed by demons, the children are shunned by their parents, scorned by their villages and rejected by society. Rescued by Sabriye Tenberken, a blind educator and adventurer who established the first school for the blind in Lhasa, the students invite the famous blind mountain climber Erik Weihenmayer to visit their school after learning about his conquest of Everest. Erik arrives in Lhasa and inspires Sabriye and her students Kyila, Sonam Bhumtso, Tashi, Gyenshen, Dachung and Tenzin to let him lead them higher than they have ever been before. The resulting three-week journey is beyond anything any of them could have predicted.
Documentary which tells the extraordinary unknown story of how the Beatles helped to destroy the USSR. In August 1962, director Leslie Woodhead made a two-minute film in Liverpool's Cavern Club with a raw and unrecorded group of rockers called the Beatles. He arranged their first live TV appearances on a local show in Manchester and watched as the Fab Four phenomenon swept the world. Twenty-five years later while making films in Russia, Woodhead became aware of how, even though they were never able to play in the Soviet Union, the Beatles' legend had soaked into the lives of a generation of kids. This film meets the Soviet Beatles generation and hears their stories about how the Fab Four changed their lives, including Putin's deputy premier Sergei Ivanov, who explains how the Beatles helped him learn English and showed him another life.
Set in a north London residential home for the active elderly, this documentary paints a portrait of life at the Mary Feilding Guild and of three of its oldest residents. With a combined age of almost 300, Rose, Hetty and Alison continue to be powerfully engaged in their individual brands of activism - from journalism to anti-war demonstrations - whilst quietly negotiating the final years of their lives. Rose, Hetty and Alison are fervently concerned about the state of the wider world and work energetically to make it a better place, but their private lives and loves are equally important. Through their intimate and surprising revelations, we learn the truth about how very old people experience life and how they deal with the intense challenges, and the indignities, that old age brings.
Ben Lewis's documentary tells the real history of Communism through the jokes told by ordinary people about the oppressive Communist regimes of the Soviet Union and its satellites. Jokes became the language of truth in a society denied free speech and confronted daily with the gap between political propaganda and reality.
Documentary about two children who have been directly affected by wars in their respective countries.
Documentary about self-confessed war profiteer Fidelis Cloer, who, in a career spanning two decades of global turmoil, has supplied kings, presidents and the occasional dictator with the finest luxury armoured vehicles money can buy. In his world, where security is a commodity that can be bought and sold, violence is to sales as the weather is to wheat futures. Always with an on eye on growth opportunities, Fidelis found himself the perfect war when the US invaded Iraq.
Documentary telling the true story of five young British freestyle footballers' journey across the Americas to Argentina in the hope of meeting their hero, Diego Maradona, a coming-of-age road movie about a group of young men in pursuit of a lifelong dream.
Documentary following the fortunes of Barcelona Football Club over a year of crisis. With poor performances and spiralling debts, reform of the club is urgently needed. The new board, under the leadership of the charismatic Joan Laporta, attempt to turn an old fashioned Catalan family affair into a global football business.
Powerful documentary from Emmy award-winning director Tom Roberts which explores the profound human consequences of America's frontier wars through the moving personal journey of retired US Major Robert 'Snuffy' Gray, who fought with the controversial 7th Cavalry Regiment.
Documentary about punk band Heavy Load, subject to the combustible flux of ego, ambition, fantasy, expectation and desire that fuels any emerging band, but uniquely made up of musicians with and without learning disabilities. This makes the band's survival a precarious negotiation between two different worlds - on the one hand the institutional timetable of day centres, work placements and social workers and, on the other, the chaotic slacker life of rehearsal rooms, studios and gigs.
Documentary following Olly Williams and Suzi Winstanley, two unique wildlife artists who simultaneously work on the same painting of exotic and endangered animals while on location in the wildest corners of the world. The film shows how they work and why what they do is so important.
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