ARTE Distribution

Mafias and Banks: two opposite worlds. They share the same taste for luxury, risk, and easy money yet they despise and fear each other and both have connections to the government.

For a long time, criminals robbed banks, ripping them open and emptying their safes. It wasn't until the end of the Second World War that the mafias realized just how much profit they could make from banking institutions, and later from finance.

Little is known about the Chinese triads, the world's most influential mafias. Thanks to exclusive interviews with key protagonists, this in-depth thriller investigation takes us right into the heart of the world’s most powerful criminal organization, to reveal its far-reaching influence on geopolitics and the economy.

Who are they? What businesses are they involved in, and what are their strategies?  What is their role in the Chinese culture and history? Founded in the 17th century, the triads built their myth around the fight against China’s enemies. After Mao’s victory, they went into exile to two new territories where they established themselves and thrived: Hong Kong and Taiwan. Triad members became businessmen so they could take control of some parts of the underground economy, both in Asia and in the West. They blended into the game of globalization, inventing new criminal drug networks while investing in real estate in major Canadian or Australian cities, and flooding the world with fentanyl and other synthetic drugs.

10% of the wealthiest Americans own 80% of the country’s resources. This film dissects the capitalist storytelling that helped perpetuate the American Dream for over 150 years, from Rockefeller to Bezos. 

Culture, advertising, public relations and above all philanthropy are the weapons of a true gospel of wealth, which, despite the inequalities, continues to feed the American psyche. But for how long?
In 2018, the net worth of the three richest people in America was equal to that of about half of the least wealthy Americans combined; that is 162 million people. Since its inception, the United States has been capitalism's very own Promised Land. But the accumulation of wealth cannot come at the expense of democracy – as the founding fathers, who were multimillionaires themselves, said. Too many inequalities heighten the risk of chaos. Capital versus democracy: a typically American equation.

Does power erode dreams? This documentary explores the ANC's transition from liberation organization to ruling party in South Africa, through the evolution of the relationship between two of its most prominent members, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma.

Exiled under the apartheid they were brothers in arms, under Mandela they loyally worked to build a non-racial state, now they are bitter rivals. Their duel threatens to tear apart the ANC and the country, as the poor desperately seek hope in change and the elite fight for the spoils of victory.
 
Behind the Rainbow features key interviews with ANC current and former leaders including Thabo Mbeki, Kgalema Motlanthe, Jacob Zuma, Pallo Jordan and Terror Lekota.

He was the world's best-known Russian opposition leader: Alexei Navalny was in serious condition after being poisoned in 2020, arrested in 2021, and has been locked up in prison camps ever since and repeatedly sentenced to additional years in prison. How did Navalny become Putin's fiercest opponent? Where did he stand politically? Was he the democratic hope that his inner circle portrayed him to be?

Russian filmmaker Igor Sadreev has been working on Navalny in secret for a long time. After the Russian attack on Ukraine, he smuggled his extensive filming equipment out of the country and left Moscow. On arrival in Berlin, he was able to complete the film with his colleague, journalist Aleksandr Urzhanov. Alexei Navalny died in prison on February 16, 2024.

From Gamal Abdel Nasser to Anwar Sadat, to Hosni Mubarak, “The Pharaohs of Modern Egypt” follows the path of the successive regimes in power, and reveals their common goal to carefully lay the basis of a solid independence, but which, on the other hand, led to the revolution on Tahrir Square in 2011. 

Between democracy and a military dictatorship, President Gamal Abdel Nasser tried to forge a tailor-made brand of socialism to eradicate deep inequality. But in order to do so, he did not hesitate to repress and gag the opposition, while further crushing civil society. His sudden death rendered his socialist vision obsolete, paving the way for his successor, President Anwar Sadat. 

2 formats available for this episode: 52' and 97'.
 
World Premiere at TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) in September 2015

Best Documentary - 2015 African Movie Academy Awards (AMAA) - Lagos, Nigeria 

Every 5 seconds, a BILLY bookcase is sold. But the staggering figures of the Swedish brand have a cost: they depend on the uncontrolled exploitation of wood and human labor. A unique investigation, tracking the production line of the furniture giant.

Investigative journalists working for Disclose spent over a year investigating the production chain of the furniture giant which generated a 44.6 billion euros revenue in 2022 and attracts over 5 billion visitors to its stores and website every year.
From the boreal forests of Sweden to Brazilian plantations and New Zealand coastlines, they uncovered how IKEA intensively exploits wood around the world, fuels the illegal trafficking of this resource and threatens the last precious European forests. Long overlooked, intensive logging is now sparking outrage and anger among citizens in Poland and the Baltic countries, who are increasingly concerned about the fate of their countries' public forest domains and biodiversity loss. In Romania, where IKEA owns 50,000 hectares of forests, activists are risking their lives mobilizing against the timber mafia. This film tells the expansion of a discreet forest predator, grappling with the limits of the planet's resources. A resource that is at the center of the fight against climate change. 

She changed the course of history: a cold case about the most enigmatic heroine of the Middle Ages. Dive into her epic rise and spectacular fall, with 3D animations and never-before-seen documents from her rehabilitation trial. 

An epic rise and a spectacular fall: the destiny of a young village girl who claimed to have been sent by God to save France from the English invaders. Worshipped by an entire people, she was adviser to the powerful, became a war leader, won decisive battles, liberated cities and had her king crowned. Her adventure would take a tragic turn – at the age of 19, when she got burned alive at the stake after a mock trial. A deep dive into European medieval history, between animation and historical documentary.

The rise and fall story of a troubling and fragile actor who would eventually get recognition for his talent. The case of Mickey Rourke is a real turning point in the way men have portrayed themselves in American cinema. 

How did Mickey Rourke, a beloved actor of the 80's who played the motorcycle boy in Rumble Fish, the crusading cop in Year of the Dragon and the cursed investigator in Angel Heart, turned so quickly into the ultimate persona non grata, a sad, tabloid-accustomed bad boy, a failed boxer and a living illustration of the excesses of plastic surgery? This film offers, beyond the classic story of a fall and a possible redemption, to draw the complex portrait of a fallen sex symbol who became an icon of trash by the force of representation of the Hollywood system.

Today, the Louvre Museum picks up where the Egyptologist Auguste Mariette left off in 1850! Join a team of archeologists and get exclusive access to (re)discover the Serapeum tomb of the Bull Apis, one of the most sacred places in Saqqara, Egypt.

He also managed to map out a network of underground tunnels leading to other burial sites he did not have time to uncover. We have exclusive access to follow a team of archeologists, commissioned by the Louvre Museum, to pick up where Mariette left off.

A new perpective on the Holocaust based on recent research revealing the role of the ghettos in the extermination of the Jewish community. This moving documentary is based on the recent exhumation and translation of diaries unveiling everyday life in the ghettos.

It's believed that there were about 1200 ghettos before and during the Second World War. Unlike the concentration camps, the ghettos created by the Nazis had no single model, nor any central administration. It was the local authorities who decided how to isolate, exploit, terrorize and annihilate the Jewish population. In the first years of their existence, they served as a place for the persecutors to experiment with the slow annihilation of an entire population that suffered terrible living conditions, deliberately created so as to increase the number of deaths among the inhabitants - who were in fact prisoners. These spaces, integral parts of the Holocaust, were reservoirs of labor for the German arms industry or construction work, before becoming, for some, places of massacre perpetrated by the Nazis. This documentary aims to follow the intimate trajectories of the ghettos and their prisoners, recounting the mortifying daily life of the Jewish community of the ghettos.

Since 2004, the island of Curaçao has been home to a dolphin therapy centre for people with physical or mental disabilities. Five dolphins help the patients to regain a zest for life. This is one of the main objectives of this type of therapy; the effectiveness of which is however questioned by the scientific community.

Five-year-old Ella is already on her third visit to the dolphin therapy centre. She has learning difficulties, does not speak, has difficulty concentrating and suffers from myasthenia. This time the dolphin Chabelita and the physiotherapist Merel Schuringa are working with her. As soon as the dolphin approaches, she relaxes. Dolphin therapy is said to help develop behaviours that other children take for granted, such as smiling, talking, being more independent and open to others. Therapists use the animals’ curiosity and liveliness to stimulate, motivate and educate patients. Creating positive emotions in the patients to help them progress seems to be the key to the project, and the therapeutic dolphins have a pivotal role to play.