For millions of viewers, Peter Falk is Columbo. Despite playing the quintessential blue-collar TV detective of the '70s and '80s, his early career is rarely explored. Using archive footage, interviews and extracts from his films and the TV show, the documentary pays tribute to the immortal character of Columbo, while shedding light on the actor’s life, one full of twists and turns, ups and downs.

Peter Falk versus Columbo

Did you think the first movies were screened in a cinema? According to groundbreaking discoveries, our prehistoric ancestors may have invented the concept while drawing on their walls. This documentary takes us right back to the beginnings of Homo sapiens' artistic heritage to discover these graphic narratives, in a unique investigation into the cultural DNA of humanity.

Stone Age Cinema

Long before the arrival of Homo Sapiens, the Neanderthals wandered the vast European plains, and regularly drowned into the Ice Ages. Several discoveries, in France and England, and especially on the island of Jersey, now allow archaeologists to understand the lifestyle of those first great nomads of Europe, that lasted 300.000 years.

Meeting Neanderthal

Sumer, Babylon, the epic of Gilgamesh, the legendary Tower of Babel: all these names embody Mesopotamia. It is in this plain, also known as the "fertile crescent", where Iraq is today, that our civilization was born. There, humanity organized itself into a society of several tens of thousands of people, invented writing and gave agriculture and architecture an unprecedented development. What does this story tell, that a terrorist group decided to want to erase its trace for good? In 2014, Daech wiped the main archaeological sites of the North off the map. The images of the exactions went around the world and convinced Jawad Bashara, an Iraqi writer and journalist exiled in France under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, to return to his country to act.

Trésors de Mésopotamie : des archéologues face à Daech

In Barcelona, the Casa Batlló alone sums up the genius of Antoni Gaudí. During the exhibition devoted to it by the Musée d'Orsay, we take a guided tour of this eccentric, colorful residence, completed in 1906.

Gaudí, le génie visionnaire de Barcelone

Discovered about twenty years ago, the immense masses of water vapor that fly over the Amazon, called "flying rivers", fascinate researchers. Their future could be intimately linked to climate change.

Le mystère des rivières volantes d'Amazonie

In 1889, Gustave Eiffel decides to attempt the impossible for the Universal Exhibition in Paris: to build the tallest tower in the world. Before this project, this pioneer and visionary had created more than 300 metal structures around the world.

Eiffel Tower: Building the Impossible

Recent discoveries show evidence of the dinosaur's survival after the huge asteroid crash onto the earth 66 million years ago. What kind of incredible dinosaurs survived even after the impact event?

L autre monde des dinosaures

Explore the revolutionary engineering behind Paris’s iconic landmark. Completed in just over two years for the 1889 World’s Fair, the iron tower smashed the record for the tallest structure on Earth, ushering in a new age of global construction that reached for the skies. How did the engineers do it? Follow the innovations, successes, and failures that made one of the most famous buildings on the planet possible.

Building the Eiffel Tower

In 2015, the discovery of a large number of Neanderthal fossils in the Mandrin cave in the heart of the Rhône valley was the starting point for an archaeological adventure. Dating back around 40,000 years, this late Neanderthal, named Thorin after Tolkien's dwarf king, provides new clues about this species, which lived on the Eurasian continent for 300,000 years before mysteriously dying out. Why did it disappear in favour of Homo sapiens? That's what prehistorian Ludovic Slimak and his team are trying to find out. For the last twenty years, they have been exploring the Mandrin cave, occupied for eighty thousand years and miraculously preserved thanks to the sands carried by the Mistral wind rushing through its northern opening.