The best Irène Jacob’s documentary movies

This portrait of the world-famous French director based on his personal correspondance reveals the little known insurgent side of his personnality. Featuring interviews with close collaborators, friends and family, this definitive documentary tells his intimate story, from the streets of Paris to the filmmaking accolades and high profile marriages at the height of his career.

The filmmaker Théo Angelopoulos died on January 24th, 2012, knocked down by a motorbike on the set of his final film. In his unfinished film, he was telling the destinies of the victims of the Greek crisis. The list of victims of the crisis has only grown longer, this destitution echoing another that Théo had sensed was coming: that of the massive arrival of refugees who find themselves trapped in Greece by the closure of the borders. Yet citizen resistance is being organized and fights every day to bring those in danger of obliteration out of the shadows. Ironically, the ambulance supposed to come to his rescue broke down because budgetary restrictions had made it impossible to maintain the vehicle. The crisis itself killed Théo. This is a letter addressed to him in the form of a film.

Summer 1939. Ella Maillart and Annemarie Schwarzenbach leave Europe for Asia. Ella hopes to make an ethnographic film and to help Annemarie get off drugs. In Kabul she realizes to have lost all certainties and faces the difficult search for herself. For a year she travels alone in the British Indies, a keen observer of the colonial system, living from moment to moment while war ravages Europe. Letters, diaries, film footage and photographs reveal a portrait of Ella Maillart (1903-1997), one of the greatest travelers and photographers of the last century. Narrated by the voice of a great actress, Irène Jacob.