Histoires extraordinaires

Louis Malle was an award-winning French film director, screenwriter, and producer. His film, Le Monde du silence, won the Palme d'Or and Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1956. He was also nominated multiple times for Academy Awards later in his career. Malle worked in both French cinema and... Hollywood, and he produced both French and English language films. His most famous films include Ascenseur pour l'échafaud , Atlantic City , and Au revoir, les enfants . Malle was born into a wealthy industrialist family in Thumeries, Nord, France. He initially studied political science at the Sciences-Po before turning to film studies at IDHEC instead. He worked as the co-director and cameraman to Jacques Cousteau on the Oscar and Palme d'Or-winning documentary The Silent World and assisted Robert Bresson on A Man Escaped before making his first feature, Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (released in the U.K. as Lift to the Scaffold and in the U.S.
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Federico Fellini was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century, and is widely revered. He won five Academy Awards and was nominated for 12 in a career... that spanned over forty years. Fellini was born on January 20, 1920 to middle-class parents in Rimini, then a small town on the Adriatic Sea. His father, Urbano Fellini , born to a family of Romagnol peasants and small landholders from Gambettola, moved to Rome in 1915 as a baker apprenticed to the Pantanella pasta factory. His mother, Ida Barbiani , came from a bourgeois Catholic family of Roman merchants. Despite her family’s vehement disapproval, she eloped with Urbano in 1917 to live at his parents' home in Gambettola. A civil marriage followed in 1918 with the religious ceremony held at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome a year later. The couple settled in Rimini where Urbano became a traveling salesman and wholesale vendor.
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Roger Vadim was a French screenwriter, director, and producer as well as a journalist, author and sometime actor. Vadim was born as Roger Vladimir Plemiannikov in Paris. His Russian father, Igor Nikolaevich Plemiannikov , had immigrated from Ukraine and became a naturalized French citizen, and was... a vice consul of France to Egypt. His mother, Marie-Antoinette Ardilouze, was a French actress. Although Vadim lived in luxury in his early youth, the death of his father, in front of Vadim when he was nine, caused the family to return to France, where his mother found work running a hostel in the French Alps which served as a way-station for Jews and other fugitives fleeing Nazi Germany. Vadim became a stage actor at the age of sixteen, after studying journalism and writing at the University of Paris, from which he did not graduate. In 1947, he became assistant to film director Marc Allégret, whom he met while working at the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt, and for whom he worked on several screenplays. In 1950, Vadim discovered Brigitte Bardot when she was only 15 and he was 22.
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