Camera Lucida Productions

In February 1972, the American president Richard Nixon went to China to meet Mao Zedong. In the context of the war in Vietnam and the cold war, this encounter marked a turning point in Chinese‑American relations. John Adams, a major musical figure of the last forty years, made this event of contemporary history the subject of his first opera. Nixon in China tackles the political thaw instigated by ping-pong diplomacy, begun by the invitation of the American table tennis players by their Chinese counterparts, one year before the presidential visit. A mesmerising work in which the pulsations and repetitions typical of minimalism are combined with melodic lines of great lyricism. For its entry into the Paris Opera repertoire, this work has been entrusted to the director Valentina Carrasco, who underlines the importance and the mediating power of Chinese national sport in history.

10-year-old Ellie is fascinated by nature and birds, she spends her time reading about them. One day, a few miles from school, she goes onto a little island on the Loire River to take a bird book back to the library. It's an island full of birds.

In the kingdom of music, different families of instruments live apart. One day, the string family heard about the saxophone family and they invited them over for a visit. The two families then decide to embark on a search of other instrument families. During their journey, other families start joining them and toghether they form a large orchestra.

Melody Gardot performs her new album Sunset in the Blue, from the Radio France studios accompanied by a trio of musicians and 40 instrumentalists from the in-house orchestra.

The prodigious genesis of a monument of world literature, too often reduced to its popular success, also recounts the tormented conversion of its author, Victor Hugo, to the ideal of social progress.

Accompanied by a child, the mathematician Galileo observes the firmament with a telescope. Ten years ago, the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned in Rome for having supported the idea of an infinite and centerless universe, based on the work of Copernicus. By dint of observations and calculations, Galileo seeks proofs for his hypothesis of a cosmic system where the Earth is "an ordinary celestial body, one among thousands". From Padua to Venice, the mathematician shakes certainties by confronting the power of a Church which wishes to maintain its absolute power in the "crystal spheres" where Ptolemy has hitherto locked up the world.

Elliott Erwitt has spent his entire adult life taking photographs, of presidents, popes and movie stars, as well as regular people and their pets. His work is iconic in world culture while his life is largely unknown.

Man has always sought to seek further afield. After the seafaring explorers of the 16th century, 21st century cosmologists today navigate more celestial oceans, with each mission providing an ever-broader and more impressive cartography of our surroundings. At the avant garde of modern technology, these strange travellers are actually immobile, and their vessels are powerful and spectacular telescopes, on the Earth or in space, constantly widening the limits of our knowledge and giving form to our dreams of infinity. From Hawaii to Australia, via South Africa and China, we set out on an incredible scientific and human adventure to visit the planet's greatest cosmic exploration centres to discover the new challenges involved in understanding the universe. A journey on Earth and in the heavens that will take your breath away!

Recorded live in June 2017 at the magnificent Liceu Theatre in Barcelona, this DVD is the companion to Joyce DiDonato’s award-winning album In War and Peace: Harmony through Music. Seeking answers to the existential question “In the midst of chaos, how do you find peace?”, it makes a compelling piece of music theatre as DiDonato journeys through arias by Handel, Purcell, Monteverdi, Leo and Jommelli with Il Pomo d’Oro and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev. On stage, In War and Peace: Harmony through Music makes a compelling piece of music theatre. In Barcelona, as on the European and North American tours she made in late 2016, DiDonato was joined by the baroque orchestra Il Pomo d’Oro and its principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev. May and June 2018 bring further performances in Portugal, France, Germany, Turkey and Hungary.

In 1965 Ingmar Bergman filmed “Persona”, the cult film that brought together all of the Swedish filmmaker’s obsessions and became a turning point in his career.

The 82-year-old Japanese Seiji Ozawa is one of the last remaining conductor legends of a golden era. Portrait of the ambitious maestro and educator who made the western repertoire really well known in Japan.

From Jean Monnet's idea of a transnational European army to the abolition of customs borders, seven years behind the scenes towards the Treaty of Rome. A docu-fiction "embedded" in the great and small histories of Europe.