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Short Documentaries

Louis Vuitton: Travel Book - Vietnam

Louis Vuitton: Travel Book - Vietnam

A Parisian by adoption, Lorenzo Mattotti was born in Brescia, Italy, in 1954. He studied architecture in Venice then moved towards the graphic novel form of which he is now one of the major exponents. In this travel book dedicated to Vietnam, Mattotti opens us towards a vibrant world of colour suffused with energy and vitality. A window into his impressions, his illustrations leave us contemplative.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Louis Vuitton: Travel Book - Hawaii

Louis Vuitton: Travel Book - Hawaii

In this new Louis Vuitton Travel Book, the Croatian comic book artist Esad Ribic draws the Hawaiian. In over 100 exclusive drawings and paintings, he offers his brilliant style that remind us Realist movement.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Louis Vuitton: Travel Book - Easter Island

Louis Vuitton: Travel Book - Easter Island

The Louis Vuitton Travel Book collection offers a new and contemporary vision of travel, both real and virtual. Intended as works of art in themselves, they depict each destination through the eyes of an artist in 100-120 exclusive drawings. In his dream-like gouaches, Arsham imagines for the Travel Book Easter Island a cosmogony in touches of grey and black, paying attention to perspective and subtle nuances.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Louis Vuitton: Travel Book - Venice

Louis Vuitton: Travel Book - Venice

This Louis Vuitton Travel book showcases the unique perspectives of contemporary artists to offer a contemporary vision of travel. Here, the famous manga master Jirô Taniguchi has created an exclusive story set in Venice.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Louis Vuitton: Travel Book - Mexico

Louis Vuitton: Travel Book - Mexico

In this new Louis Vuitton Travel Book, the French writer, illustrator and painter Nicolas de Crécy depicts Mexico as a baroque land full of poetry. In over 100 exclusive drawings and painting, he offers varied graphic and stylistic forms that rivisit genres and techniques.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Louis Vuitton: Travel Book - London

Louis Vuitton: Travel Book - London

The Louis Vuitton Travel Book collection offers a new and contemporary vision of travel, both real and virtual. Intended as works of art in themselves, they depict each destination through the eyes of an artist in 100-120 exclusive drawings. The Travel Book London by emerging Japanese artist Natsko Seki offers a lively and poetic vision of the UK capital.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all

Advice to the Young from Norman Foster

Advice to the Young from Norman Foster

Norman Foster, one of the architectural icons of our time, here advises upcoming architects and artists to make sure that what they’re doing is their true desire – if not, they should simply find something else. When you can’t imagine doing anything else, and you would do anything to be able to do it, then you know you’ve made the right decision. From then on it’s a matter of completely immersing yourself in that choice: You live it every living second of your life.

Duration : 1m
Maturity Level : all

Advice to the Young from Olafur Eliasson

Advice to the Young from Olafur Eliasson

Artists should have confidence in the fact that making a drawing is changing the world. Danish-Icelandic artist, Olafur Eliasson, here presents his strong and personal advice to young artists. Making art is making the world, Eliasson continues, stressing his point that art should not be marginalized, as art is not fragile, but quite the opposite. Artists should be very sensitive to their surroundings and the context in which they find themselves. They should, however, also stay true to themselves and make sure that the strong market and its attractiveness does not commercialize them.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

Advice to the Young from Wim Wenders

Advice to the Young from Wim Wenders

Do what nobody else can do except for you. Such is the unflagging advice from German filmmaker Wim Wenders, who in this video gives us his take on how to become a successful artist. According to Wenders, achieving success in your creative endeavors is quite simply a matter of finding the thing that you can do better than anyone else. The message is clear and delivered with great resolution by one of the most important German directors on the international scene.

Duration : 56s
Maturity Level : all

Advice to the Young from David Byrne

Advice to the Young from David Byrne

If the musician or artist values their freedom and the ability to be creative, then they have to realize they won’t be making hundreds of millions of dollars. Sound advice from the multifaceted musician David Byrne. If you value your creative freedom, you might have to do other work on the side, to make a living, Byrne explains: Often the artists who are very successful don’t have much flexibility. In achieving success they lose a lot of their creative freedom. They have to keep making the same thing, more or less, over and over again.

Duration : 1m
Maturity Level : all

Advice to the Young from Jonathan Franzen

Advice to the Young from Jonathan Franzen

How do you succeed as a writer? Get useful, and humorous, advice from someone who indeed has indeed made it through the loophole – chart-topping American novelist Jonathan Franzen. If you hang out with me I would have a lot of advice. Although I would feel somewhat embarrassed about giving advice to the young writer, Franzen begins. The most important advice I have is to have fun… if you’re having fun there’s a good chance that the reader will too. Having fun, however, should be in the sense that there’s still a kind of structure and focus to it: Fun like you’re in a tennis court… That’s the kind of focused fun I’m talking about.

Duration : 1m
Maturity Level : all

Historic Center of Agadez - Niger

Historic Center of Agadez - Niger

Known as the gateway to the desert, Agadez, on the southern edge of the Sahara desert, developed in the 15th and 16th centuries when the Sultanate of Aïr was established and Touareg tribes were sedentarized in the city, respecting the boundaries of old encampments, which gave rise to a street pattern still in place today. The historic centre of the city, an important crossroads of the caravan trade, is divided into 11 quarters with irregular shapes. They contain numerous earthen dwellings and a well-preserved group of palatial and religious buildings including a 27m high minaret made entirely of mud brick, the highest such structure in the world. The site is marked by ancestral cultural, commercial and handicraft traditions still practiced today and presents exceptional and sophisticated examples of earthen architecture.

Duration : 1m
Maturity Level : all

Al Zubarah Archaeological Site - Qatar

Al Zubarah Archaeological Site - Qatar

The walled coastal town of Al Zubarah in the Persian Gulf flourished as a pearling and trading centre in the late 18th century and early 19th centuries, before it was destroyed in 1811 and abandoned in the early 1900s. Founded by merchants from Kuwait, Al Zubarah had trading links across the Indian Ocean, Arabia and Western Asia. A layer of sand blown from the desert has protected the remains of the site’s palaces, mosques, streets, courtyard houses, and fishermen’s huts; its harbour and double defensive walls, a canal, walls, and cemeteries. Excavation has only taken place over a small part of the site, which offers an outstanding testimony to an urban trading and pearl-diving tradition which sustained the region’s major coastal towns and led to the development of small independent states that flourished outside the control of the Ottoman, European, and Persian empires and eventually led to the emergence of modern day Gulf States.

Duration : 1m
Maturity Level : all

The Ruins of Ani - Turkey

The Ruins of Ani - Turkey

This site is located on a secluded plateau of northeast Turkey overlooking a ravine that forms a natural border with Armenia. This medieval city combines residential, religious and military structures, characteristic of a medieval urbanism built up over the centuries by Christian and then Muslim dynasties. The city flourished in the 10th and 11th centuries CE when it became the capital of the medieval Armenian kingdom of the Bagratides and profited from control of one branch of the Silk Road. Later, under Byzantine, Seljuk and Georgian sovereignty, it maintained its status as an important crossroads for merchant caravans. The Mongol invasion and a devastating earthquake in 1319 marked the beginning of the city’s decline. The site presents a comprehensive overview of the evolution of medieval architecture through examples of almost all the different architectural innovations of the region between the 7th and 13th centuries CE.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

The Ruins of Aphrodisias - Turkey

The Ruins of Aphrodisias - Turkey

Located in southwestern Turkey, in the upper valley of the Morsynus River, the site consists of two components: the archaeological site of Aphrodisias and the marble quarries northeast of the city. The temple of Aphrodite dates from the 3rd century BC and the city was built one century later. The wealth of Aphrodisias came from the marble quarries and the art produced by its sculptors. The city streets are arranged around several large civic structures, which include temples, a theatre, an agora and two bath complexes.

Duration : 1m
Maturity Level : all

Birthplace of Jesus: Church of the Nativity and Pilgrimage Route - Palestine

Birthplace of Jesus: Church of the Nativity and Pilgrimage Route - Palestine

The Birthplace of Jesus: the Church of the Nativity and Pilgrimage Route, Bethlehem, Palestine, situated 10 km south of Jerusalem on the site identified by Christian tradition as the birthplace of Jesus since the 2nd century. A church was first completed there in 339 CE and the edifice that replaced it after a fire in the 6th century retains elaborate floor mosaics from the original building. The site also includes Latin, Greek Orthodox, Franciscan and Armenian convents and churches, as well as bell towers, terraced gardens and a pilgrimage route. Inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2012, the site was added simultaneously to the List of World Heritage in Danger due to the poor state of the Nativity Church.

Duration : 1m
Maturity Level : all

Cumalikizik - Turkey

Cumalikizik - Turkey

This property is a serial nomination of eight component sites in the City of Bursa and the nearby village of Cumalıkızık, in the southern Marmara region. The site illustrates the creation of an urban and rural system establishing the Ottoman Empire in the early 14th century. The property embodies the key functions of the social and economic organization of the new capital which evolved around a civic centre. These include commercial districts of khans, kulliyes (religious institutions) integrating mosques, religious schools, public baths and a kitchen for the poor, as well as the tomb of Orhan Ghazi, founder of the Ottoman dynasty. One component outside the historic centre of Bursa is the village of Cumalıkızık, the only rural village of this system to show the provision of hinterland support for the capital.

Duration : 1m
Maturity Level : all

City of Erbil - Iraq

City of Erbil - Iraq

Erbil Citadel is a fortified settlement on top of an imposing ovoid-shaped tell (a hill created by many generations of people living and rebuilding on the same spot) in the Kurdistan region, Erbil Governorate. A continuous wall of tall 19th-century façades still conveys the visual impression of an impregnable fortress, dominating the city of Erbil. The citadel features a peculiar fan-like pattern dating back to Erbil’s late Ottoman phase. Written and iconographic historical records document the antiquity of settlement on the site – Erbil corresponds to ancient Arbela, an important Assyrian political and religious centre – while archaeological finds and investigations suggest that the mound conceals the levels and remains of previous settlements.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

Hebron/Al-Khalil Old Town - Palestine

Hebron/Al-Khalil Old Town - Palestine

The use of a local limestone shaped the construction of the old town of Hebron/Al-Khalil during the Mamluk period between 1250 and 1517. The centre of interest of the town was the site of Al-Ibrahimi Mosque/The tomb of the Patriarchs whose buildings are in a compound built in the 1st century AD to protect the tombs of the patriarch Abraham/Ibrahim and his family. This place became a site of pilgrimage for the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The town was sited at the crossroads of trade routes for caravans travelling between southern Palestine, Sinai, Eastern Jordan and the north of the Arabian Peninsula. Although the subsequent Ottoman Period (1517-1917) heralded an extension of the town to the surrounding areas and brought numerous architectural additions, particularly the raising of the roof level of houses to provide more upper stories, the overall Mamluk morphology of the town is seen to have persisted with its hierarchy of areas, quarters based on ethnic, religious or professional groupings, and houses with groups of rooms organized according to a tree-shaped system.

Duration : 1m
Maturity Level : all

Masjed-e Jamé of Isfahan - Republic Islamic of Iran

Masjed-e Jamé of Isfahan - Republic Islamic of Iran

Located in the historic centre of Isfahan, the Masjed-e Jāmé (‘Friday mosque’) can be seen as a stunning illustration of the evolution of mosque architecture over twelve centuries, starting in ad 841. It is the oldest preserved edifice of its type in Iran and a prototype for later mosque designs throughout Central Asia. The complex, covering more than 20,000 m2, is also the first Islamic building that adapted the four-courtyard layout of Sassanid palaces to Islamic religious architecture. Its double-shelled ribbed domes represent an architectural innovation that inspired builders throughout the region. The site also features remarkable decorative details representative of stylistic developments over more than a thousand years of Islamic art.

Duration : 1m
Maturity Level : all

Archaeological Sites of the Island of Meroe - Sudan

Archaeological Sites of the Island of Meroe - Sudan

The Archaeological Sites of the Island of Meroe, a semi-desert landscape between the Nile and Atbara rivers, was the heartland of the Kingdom of Kush, a major power from the 8th century B.C. to the 4th century A.D. The property consists of the royal city of the Kushite kings at Meroe, near the River Nile, the nearby religious site of Naqa and Musawwarat es Sufra. It was the seat of the rulers who occupied Egypt for close to a century and features, among other vestiges, pyramids, temples and domestic buildings as well as major installations connected to water management. Their vast empire extended from the Mediterranean to the heart of Africa, and the property testifies to the exchange between the art, architectures, religions and languages of both regions.

Duration : 1m
Maturity Level : all

Bingyi’s Madness and Magic

Bingyi’s Madness and Magic

Bingyi’s ink works plumb extremes of scale, from minutely brushed fan-sized paintings, to works boldly splashed across paper-covered stretches of a mountain road. Executed in ever-changing boldly idiosyncratic styles, her works show a sensitivity for nature and for social conditions.

Duration : 13m
Maturity Level : all

Chen Haiyan’s Dreams

Chen Haiyan’s Dreams

Whether paintings or woodcuts, style and medium fuse seamlessly in the expression of Chen Haiyan’s subject matter. This consists of narratives from her dream diaries illustrated with an unparalleled emotional directness, fusing traditional elite aesthetics with a robust vernacular quality.

Duration : 18m
Maturity Level : all

Li Huasheng’s Ambivalence

Li Huasheng’s Ambivalence

In 1989 Li Huasheng turned from the distinctive style of landscape painting for which he was widely known, to the creation of pure abstractions. Producing grids of meticulously inscribed lines that record the passage of time, his new mode of creativity emphasizes process rather than finished work.

Duration : 9m
Maturity Level : all