During the Second Empire, Montmartre was a place of bad repute, an unprivileged district of ill fame with tortuous streets that had nothing to do with the Hausmanian districts of Paris. What magical device transformed it - in a few decades and for nearly half a century- into a both fascinating and repulsing place, hell and paradise together, the international centre of the most varied and shameful pleasures but also the dazzling crucible of contemporary avant-garde art?
This question will be at the heart of our film as the main enigma of this legendary and paradoxical district. This saga has been dealt with as if it were a colourful and lively fresco full of actions, developments and surprising events. Our film, in quite a stylish way, reflects everyday life in this busy district where, more than anywhere else in Paris, there was a mixing of genres, styles, social classes and unrestrained feelings. Light comedy and dark melodrama, innocence and vice, tenderness and fierceness, luxury and misery, the sublime and sordidness, history and trivial events, masters’ art and street art such a diversity made of Montmartre a very special place
