Emile Abinal

At 35 years old, photographer JR is a street art worldwide star. Discovered after the Paris’ suburb riots of 2005 for his portraits of young people, his collages have adorned the galleries of the Louvre, the Pompidou Center, the Pantheon, the National Assembly ever since … From New York to Shanghai, and the Israeli-Palestinian wall to the US-Mexico border, he has stuck or exhibited giant photos on the walls of dozens of countries and associated hundreds of thousands of unknown artists with his projects. With the active collaboration of the artist himself, the documentary “# JR” tells the extraordinary adventure of this art activist whose spectacular interventions are all clear expressions of humanism, pacifism or remembrance relayed by his very strong involvement in social networks. For JR, art can help change the world.

In his film "Women Are Heroes", photographer JR takes his audience into some exceptional women’s lives. Because there are, most of the time, the first victims in war-time and left to their own during peace-time, JR pays tribute to those women who, in spite of the hurdles, keep smiling, keep fighting and keep hoping a better life. From Rio’s shantytowns to Kenyan slums, passing by Indian and Cambodian streets, he offers a fresh look at their struggles and expectations. Displaying their portraits via huge montages on their neighborhood’s walls, JR sublimates those extraordinary destinies and sheds the lights on those strong and moving personalities, too rarely recognized enough.

A wall can be a barrier. It can be a structure of limitation or a source of repression. For the Inside Out Project, a wall is a canvas, and so are sides of trains, the arches of bridges and the steps leading to Brooklyn brownstones. This fascinating documentary tracks the evolution of the world’s largest participatory art project, the wildly popular Inside Out. From Haiti to Tunisia, South Dakota to the streets of Paris, French artist JR motivates communities to define their most important causes by pasting giant portraits in the street, testing the limits of what they thought possible. The power of paper turns people who feel without voice into unlikely activists by empowering them with their own images.

In 2012, the french artist JR collaborates with Cuban-American artist Jose Parla in Cuba for the Havana Biennale. Through JR's pasting and Jose's painting they created murals to tell the stories of 25 senior citizens who have lived through the Cuban revolution.