Kryptonim Farewell

This feature is a journey through Kenny Rogers' life and chart-busting career. Weaving in performances from his star-studded farewell show in Nashville, the biography charts Kenny’s hard-won 60-year career. Kenny’s friends, family and fellow artists tell the story of how Kenny Rogers rose from adversity- battled obscurity - and a pop culture superstar.

Saigon in the 1950s: Mui, a 10-year-old peasant girl, has come to serve a rich family. A discreet, almost invisible spy, she learns their secrets - the husband runs the household to ruin. Ten years later, she moves on to a more modern home where the young master chooses her over his Westernized fiancée. He teaches her to read, but doesn't really remove her from the kitchen. Tran Anh Hung, a Vietnamese raised in Paris, has made a hymn to subservience riddled with symbols. The papaya of the title is picked by servants: when ripe it is a fruit, when green, a vegetable. The name Mui means aroma and Yen-Khé Tran Nu who plays the ripe Mui is certainly sweet. Shot in a studio outside Paris, the enticing settings (a latticed house, a dream kitchen), the subdued tone and insinuating soundtrack make an aesthetic whole that coincides with the current exotica fascination, particularly in France where nostalgia for the colonial past dies hard.

A fictionalized autobiographical look at filmmaker Spike Lee's family during the 1970s, as told through the eyes of a 9-year-old girl, Troy. Throughout the film, Troy learns life lessons through her four rowdy brothers, her loving but strict mother, summer adventures and final farewell.

Rigueur historique, sens du récit, splendeur des photos d'archives : dix-sept ans avant The war (diffusé par ARTE en mars 2008), et grâce aux mêmes ingrédients, Ken Burns montrait déjà avec La guerre de Sécession (The civil war) qu'une histoire bien racontée captive tous les publics.
Bercée par la mélancolie du thème musical ("Ashokan Farewell", du compositeur folk Jay Ungar), cette monumentale série documentaire en neuf épisodes mêle dans un même souffle, grâce à une voix off subtilement composée, la chronique intimiste et les grandes batailles, les discours célèbres et les voix oubliées, les destins d'Abraham Lincoln, des généraux ennemis Ulysse Grant et Robert Lee, et ceux des millions d'anonymes que ces années sanglantes allaient transformer pour toujours.