James Dean walks down Broadway, his shoulders hunched against the drizzle. The greatest legends of jazz, from Louis Armstrong to the cool Miles Davis, are caught in some of their most passionate or private moments. Epitomizing the spirit of 1960’s counter-culture, a hippie plays a flute as he walks along, all his earthly belongings in a back-pack. Lost in her own thoughts for a moment, Audrey Hepburn sits pensive between takes. Images capture the subdued beauty of a Provence winter. Like an abstract painting, the sun appears as a point of light behind a window coated thickly with frost. Modern architecture captured as an almost sci-fi fantasy - an environment so artificial that it is sublimely beautiful. All of these images came from the eye, mind and camera of Dennis Stock (1928-2010), one of the most influential chroniclers of the late 20th century.
The film tells the story of the intimate and unprecedented encounter between the photojournalists of the Magnum Agency and the world of cinema. The confrontation of two seemingly opposite worlds – fiction and reality. For 70 years their paths crossed: a family of photographers, amongst them the biggest names in photography, and a family of actors and filmmakers who helped write the history of cinema, from John Huston to Marilyn Monroe to Orson Welles, Kate Winslet and Sean Penn.
