Directed by Céline Sallette • Drama • With Charlotte Le Bon • 2025 • 99 minutes
The debut feature of actor-turned-director Céline Sallette, Niki is a vibrant portrait of French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle (Charlotte Le Bon, star of The White Lotus), one of the most iconoclastic figures of the contemporary art world.
Fleeing the oppressive atmosphere of post-war America, Niki arrives in Paris in 1952 with her husband Harry (John Robinson) ready to leave the past behind. But as she embarks on her new bohemian life in Paris, she is haunted by flashbacks and lingering childhood trauma that pushes her towards mental illness. When this culminates in being institutionalized, she turns to art as a means of survival. Emerging from darkness with a fierce creative drive, she enters the avant-garde art scene of Montparnasse.
Blending emotional intimacy with striking visual invention, Niki offers a vivid look at the making of an icon—an artist who defied convention and transformed deep psychological wounds into creativity and artistic reinvention.
Up Next in Painters (a collection)
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Claude Monet in Giverny, Alice's House
Directed by Philippe Piguet • Documentary • 2011 • 50 minutes
For 43 years - half of his life -, from 1883 to his death in 1926, Claude Monet lived in Giverny. When he settled in his house in Normandy, a new life began for the painter. He embarked on an innovative pictorial adventure, developing...
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Drunk on Too Much Life
Directed by Michelle Melles • Documentary • 2021 • 77 minutes
Drunk on Too Much Life is an intimate and powerful documentary following the filmmaker's 21-year-old daughter’s mind-opening journey from locked-down psych wards and diagnostic labels towards expansive worlds of creativity, connection...
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The Art of Nothing
Directed by Stefan Liberski • Drama • With Benoit Poelvoorde, Camille Cottin • 2025 • 110 minutes
"Tabula rasa and vita nova," exclaims artist Jean-Yves Machond (Benoît Poelvoorde). "A clean slate and a new life." Leaving Brussels and his job as a professor to settle in Normandy, Machond searche...
