Directed by Charlotte Gainsbourg • Documentary • With Jane Birkin, Charlotte Gainsbourg • 2021 • 92 minutes
In creating a documentary portrait of a parent, as actor Charlotte Gainsbourg does in her directorial debut, one could overly flatter the subject or iron out the tough creases. Gainsbourg avoids these traps in her film about her legendary mother, the singer and actress Jane Birkin. Consisting of several intimate conversations between parent and child, as well as footage of Birkin performing onstage, the result is a spare, loving window into the emotional lives of two women as they talk about subject matter that ranges from the delightful to the difficult: aging, dying, insomnia, celebrity, and their differing memories of their shared past, which includes Charlotte's father and Jane's husband, Serge Gainsbourg. Jane by Charlotte is an unexpected, imaginatively visualized work that affords intimate access to someone whom many of us only think we know.
Up Next in Biography
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Bettie Page Reveals All
Directed by Mark Mori • Documentary • With Bettie Page, Hugh Heffner, Dita Von Teese • 2013 • 101 minutes
Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Mark Mori’s Bettie Page Reveals All is an intimate look at one of the world’s most recognized sex symbols, told in her own words for the first time. In Mori...
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What Means Something
Directed by Ben Rivers • Documentary • With Rose Wylie • 2015 • 66 minutes
A portrait of the painter Rose Wylie. I met Rose quite a few years ago and we became good friends. I asked her if I could make a film about her and she agreed. The film, finally, is a meeting between two friends, made spo...
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In Search of Memory
Directed by Petra Seeger • Documentary • With Eric Kandel • 2008 • 95 minutes
'Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing,' says neuroscientist Eric Kandel, winner of the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking research on the physiology of the brain's storage of memories. As he explains, memory...
