After half a century of speaking only for animals, Brigitte Bardot, the world’s first global film icon opens up about fame, freedom, and the price of both in a flawlessly executed new documentary
“Every morning, I wake up and I am sad.”
Brigitte Bardot delivers this confession not with drama, but with the matter-of-fact weariness of someone who has spent decades contemplating nature and the strange arc of her own mythology. At age 91, sitting casually dressed for a new documentary, surrounded by cats and dogs, and painters utensils in front of her, the woman who once ignited worldwide fascination has finally broken her self-imposed silence. But rather than reminiscing about her legendary beauty or her films, she reveals something more unsettling: the profound loneliness at the center of being an icon.
Video via My French Stories on YouTube
“I don’t care if people remember me,” she tells producer Nicolas Bary and co-director Elora Thevenet. “What I would really like is for people to remember the respect we owe to animals.”
It is a statement that encapsulates everything paradoxical about Bardot. The sex symbol who chose animals over adoration, the feminist icon who rejects feminism, the sultry woman whose pouty lips and tousled mane graced a thousand magazine covers but who now finds joy in quietly contemplating tree leaves and the stars in the sky.
The documentary, co-created by Nicolas Bary, Elora Thevenet, and Alain Berliner, arriving in French cinemas on 3 December does not attempt to resolve these contradictions. Instead, it does something more honest: it lets them breathe. The narrative is elegantly written, yet there is a raw honesty to the story that traces her difficult life from a joyless childhood to her sudden explosion at the zenith of stardom, her complex relationships with men, and her eventual retirement from show business in the early 1970s at age 38, to dedicate her life to her one true love: animals. Rather than making voyeurs of viewers, the film creates attachment to the protagonist as the story unfolds, vacillating between wanting to hug the vulnerable girl and applauding the indomitable force of nature that Bardot is.
Alain Berliner – Elora Thevenet via Instagram – Nicolas Bary (Wikimedia Commons)
Should you see it? Yes, unequivocally. It is a cinematographic masterpiece of rare depth. But read on to understand why this documentary matters and how these filmmakers brilliantly succeeded in capturing Bardot’s story, which is so much more complex and compelling than her legend suggests.
Two Generations, Two Bardots
Ask someone of the analog generation about Brigitte Bardot, and they will tell you about the movie star, the blonde phenomenon of “And God Created Woman,” the muse who worked with Godard, the sexy, free-spirited woman who didn’t give a damn about conventions, the pioneer that helped women tear down gender boundaries, or the voice that sang with Serge Gainsbourg. The late French president de Gaulle once said that France was “The Eiffel Tower, Bardot, and me”. For anyone who still recalls her box office-breaking movies, her animal activism is a curious footnote, a late-life passion project.
Video via thecultbox on YouTube
Ask someone of the digital generation – like the filmmakers – , and they will rave about the Fondation Brigitte Bardot (FBB), one of France’s most important animal welfare organizations, and the woman behind it who stood up to hunters, horse butchers, and governments, who doesn’t avoid confrontation with the powers that be to speak for those without voices. Her movies, in this version, are merely biographical context – interesting, certainly, but not the point.
Video via AP Archive on YouTube
This inversion of identity reveals how completely Bardot succeeded in her stated mission to be remembered for her cause, not her film career. For an entire generation of activists, including co-director Elora Thevenet, that’s exactly what happened. “I was amazed to realize that her battle of raising awareness for the animal condition – that I thought was recent – had actually begun before I was even born,” Thevenet says.
But this success came at an extraordinary cost to BB, as the documentary explores in unflinching detail.
The Meteor That Never Faded
Bardot remains the most recognized French personality globally, fifty years after she walked away from cinema at the absolute height of her powers. In bars from New York to São Paulo, 1960s posters of her still hang on walls. Jane Birkin and Catherine Deneuve, both interviewed for context, agree: no French actress has ever experienced the crowd movements that Bardot inspired. Even immense talents lack her aura.
“She is not just an actress,” explains Thevenet. “She’s also a dancer, a singer, a model, and the greatest defender of animal rights. Today, Brigitte is often caricatured, yet she is a multifaceted, profound woman.”
The documentary’s challenge was capturing these multiplicities within 90 minutes. The filmmakers chose a non-chronological approach, leaping through time to follow themes rather than timelines, a structure that mirrors Bardot’s own refusal to be contained by conventional narrative.
But the truth is, BB is “une femme entière”, as the French say – a woman of integrity who stands by her convictions, and she has done so all her life.
Carte Blanche
The project’s origins reach back more than three years when film director Nicolas Bary, who has a family relationship with Bardot’s attorney François Xavier Kelidjian who has managed the star’s foundation for years, discussed the possibility of either a biopic or an ambitious documentary. The latter path won out.
“It’s a way to discover the universe of a personality,” Bary explains. When Elora Thevenet joined as co-producer and co-director, she brought her own history as a volunteer filming animal welfare actions to the table, and a letter Bardot had once written her.
The real coup was securing Bardot’s participation. For years, she has refused interviews, finding them boring and invasive, preferring to speak only about animal causes. But this time, something shifted.
“She really gave us carte blanche,” Bary recalls. “I even sensed a genuine letting go on her part.”
During their final interview this year, they explored subjects Bardot had never previously discussed. Her responses came without filters: “I don’t want to be a victim of my anger anymore.” “I meditate a lot on things… I think about all the stars out there, and their purpose… it’s important to me.”
Perhaps most telling, when Bardot watched the trailer, she exclaimed “What’s next!” with the enthusiasm of discovering their work, never commenting on their editorial choices. It is consistent with her old filmmaking philosophy: she never stood behind monitors to comment on takes, allowing directors to create their works.
When Contradictions Become Consistencies
What struck the filmmakers most was how every stage of Bardot’s life reveals powerful contrasts. She is someone who alternates between love and rage. She married four times and tried to take her own life on several occasions during her acting career… attempts that tellingly ceased once she devoted herself to her eponymous foundation.
“She is a ‘figure pétrie de contradictions et de passions’,” says Bary, using a French phrase that suggests being kneaded from contradictions and passions, shaped by them like clay. “She championed women’s causes but isn’t a feminist. She revolutionized fashion but remains timeless. Her film career was abnormal – it started with bimbo roles and ended up in front of Clouzot’s camera.”
The documentary doesn’t shy from difficult terrain. Viewers see Bardot at the apex of her ravishing beauty, but also during complicated periods and controversial positions. The filmmakers knew she expected them to address everything.
“It wouldn’t honor her to make a totally hagiographic film,” Bary insists. “At the time of ‘And God Created Woman,’ Brigitte Bardot was perceived as the tempting demon. Since then, embodying the one who shocks has become part of her style.”
Co-director Alain Berliner puts it more simply: “She doesn’t stick to political correctness. But you can’t take away her sincerity.”
The Political Tightrope Walk
For French audiences, Bardot’s political journey is particularly complex. Her proximity to the ideas of Front National, Marine Le Pen’s ultra-right-wing party, has brought her a lot of criticism. But in reality, it is her single-minded devotion to animal welfare that has led her to support politicians across the spectrum, not based on their broader ideology but on whether they promised to help her cause. The pattern became grimly predictable: empty promises from leaders seeking her endorsement, followed by disappointment when those promises evaporated once power was secured.
This political zigzag often backfired spectacularly. It led to associations that damaged her credibility and positioned her in ways that had nothing to do with her actual concerns. She became controversial not just for what she believed about animals, but for her apparent naiveté (or willful disregard). The woman who saw so clearly when it came to animal suffering often couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see the political machinations around her.
Accusations of racism are another point of contention. When Bardot campaigned against the ritual sacrificial slaughter of lambs for Muslim holidays, it was quickly interpreted as her being against the North-African immigrants in France who in their majority are Muslims – which was absolutely not the case, as she emphatically states.
The filmmakers don’t omit these complexities. They understand that Bardot’s refusal to fit into conventional boxes is both admirable in its purity and troubling in its blindness to broader consequences. It’s another contradiction in a life built from them. And all of these stories are the sideshow and distraction from the brilliant work the foundation she created does.
The High Price of Being One of The World’s Most Desired Women
The documentary’s most disturbing revelation, however, is about what stardom on that level actually meant in practice.
She endured intrusions beyond imagination. Over years, the paparazzi were a hunting pack chasing prey. She compares herself to a hunted animal – an analogy the documentary explores visually, moving from the viewfinder of a camera to the sight of a rifle. Once, during the Cannes Film Festival, she experienced genuine trauma that left her agoraphobic.
She could not even feel safe in her own home. Perfect strangers thought nothing of violating her privacy, climbing in her swimming pool or stealing and selling her clothes.
The viewer cannot help making mental comparisons to other celebrities like Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana who for all their fame and beauty were desperately unhappy. And like them, despite being one of the most surrounded stars in history, this didn’t prevent Brigitte from sinking into depression. What should have been moments of celebration transformed into psychological exhaustion. Yet, despite the constant assault, she remained very polite, very smiling, very kind, and answered in polished French or fluent English.
She began to withdraw, engaging in numerous affairs with co-stars of whom she believed they understood the pressure of show business. Marriage after marriage failed. In 1960, she had a son, Nicolas-Jacques, but she didn’t raise him herself, thinking herself to be unfit as a mother. In a revelation that didn’t make the final cut, Bardot confided something particularly poignant: “I can’t live alone. Yes… me, the independent one!” This solitude traces back to childhood rejection wounds, a subject that fascinates Bary as a director. “Exploring this part of vulnerability was essential for this documentary.” She who was adored by half a planet had cruelly lacked maternal love. Her mother never expressed pride except once, by telephone, for her work as an actress not of cinema but of the animal cause.
“I gave my beauty and my youth to men. I am going to give my wisdom and experience to animals.”
― Brigitte Bardot
The Voices That Built the Portrait
The filmmakers assembled also contributors from different generations and backgrounds … essential for a film meant to travel worldwide and engage audiences unfamiliar with Bardot’s full story.
Some choices were obvious: for animal welfare, Paul Watson, among other famous personalities. For music, Jean-Max Rivière (one of Bardot’s lyricists who recently passed away) alongside the contemporary group Madame Monsieur, who reinterpret her songs. For fashion, Naomi Campbell confirming Bardot as an essential reference, and Stella McCartney, whose vegan brand connects her to understanding overwhelming celebrity through her father Paul McCartney’s experience.
Other choices reveal the documentary’s ambition. Spanish actress Ester Expósito, who like Bardot began young in irreverent roles, relates to a similar shift to immense popularity, though in her case, through social media rather than newspapers. And performance artist Marina Abramović reveals the drastic measures she undertook as a child to resemble Brigitte Bardot.
“This boundless passion also inspired my involvement,” Thevenet admits. “My grandparents had Bardot’s age. My grandmother coloured her hair like her and cut magazine pages to sew identical dresses. My grandfather had a poster of her on his construction sites, proud that the world’s most beautiful face was French. She triggered public passion without equivalent.”
Alain Berliner, who conducted many of the interviews with contributors, found the process revelatory. “I sat with about forty people, in French and English, and I loved asking them questions with the feeling of creating a connection, even a brief one, to better understand Brigitte Bardot. And I tell you this almost amused because I’m not at all certain I understood her! You have to accept rationally that she’s a woman who triggers passions.”
One interview particularly moved him: Ginette Vincendeau, a professor of film studies, discussing Bardot’s place as a woman at the peak of her career who used her star power to push an entire generation of women from being docile housewives to becoming free and independent. But Bardot never sought to be a feminist, she just set an example that you can say “No!” to the role of wife as senior servant of the household, and “Yes!” to enjoying sensuality and your body.
When Purpose Replaced Despair
But at age 38, Brigitte had “ras le bol”, enough, of the film world with all its trappings. She started dedicating herself to her chosen cause in earnest.
“Today, celebrities tend to support causes, often to maintain their media image,” Thevenet notes. “On the contrary, Brigitte Bardot did this starting in the 1960s, at the risk of losing all credibility, because her convictions mattered more than her reputation.”
“One can smile seeing the documentary sequence where Brigitte Bardot arrives at the SPA in her Rolls to collect dogs, like some sort of eccentric millionaire fantasy,” Berliner observes. “But in fact, not at all. It is totally sincere. This third part of her life is essential with the creation of the Foundation. It is what will truly remain of her and survive her through transmission to other generations.”
Numerous highly mediatized initiatives ensue. She smartly used her fame to draw attention to animals’ sufferings, like the baby seals in Newfoundland which were killed by the tens of thousands each year.
Video via Nostalgie Brigitte Bardot on YouTube
But her battle for animal welfare also had grave consequences. Hunters threatened her with guns. Others killed her dogs. Horse butchers appeared in bloody aprons with knives to intimidate her. Anonymous death threats arrived. Yet she continued at all costs because she found meaning in her life.
The documentary doesn’t quickly dispense with this chapter as others have done. Instead, it recognizes that for Bardot herself, this is the only chapter that matters. Everything else – her beauty, her films, her scandals – was prelude.
For younger activists like Thevenet, this realization was transformative. As a member of the generation that views environmental consciousness and animal welfare as contemporary concerns, she discovered that Bardot had been fighting these battles when they were considered ridiculous, and when her grandparents’ generation seemed “impervious to this sensitivity, since the concept of animal suffering itself was ridiculous and foreign to them.”
In 1986, Bardot sold her jewelry and possessions at auction to raise 3 million francs and establish her Foundation. Five years later, she donated La Madrague itself to meet the legal requirements for official recognition as serving the public interest – a status finally granted in 1992. What began as one woman’s radical choice has become an operation spanning 70 countries, conducting over 1,500 investigations annually, maintaining four sanctuaries housing more than 7,000 rescued animals, and achieving legislative victories including bans on mink farming, wild animals in circuses, and the sale of dogs and cats in pet stores.
FBB operates highly efficiently but Brigitte knows that nothing beats her fame. To this day, despite her advanced age, she still fights on the front lines herself, going to protests like the one in support of Captain Paul Watson in 2024, and writing personal letters to presidents, religious and secular leaders, or Thank You cards adorned with her trademark flower to fellow fighters for important causes.
I have immense respect for your calling to serve children. I dedicate my life to animals and the horrors are the same. Courage! Hugs”
By Paul de Métairy – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, link
The Accidental Prophet
If Bardot’s story resonates now, it is recognition, not nostalgia. She was speaking truths about female objectification, the violence of fame, and environmental consciousness when these were career-destroying positions. Now they’re mainstream.
“Without realizing it, she played a major role for women,” Thevenet argues. “She put abusive producers in their place before the era demanded it.” She supported numerous women, including her agent, her producer, her makeup artist, her body double. She stood alongside Simone Veil to defend the right to abortion.
Then she had the courage to pass from the status of France’s favorite personality to that of a mocked figure by speaking for animals. “What characterises her most is freedom,” Thevenet continues. The freedom of movement, to dress, to kiss, to speak, to simply be… despite the risks. “Actions are sometimes more eloquent than words,” Thevenet suggests. “Words don’t mean the same thing for everyone.”
Bary adds: “She is a woman who always took great care never to fit into a box.”
The Sound of a Life
The documentary’s musical approach mirrors its thematic ambition. Composer Laurent Perez del Mar created an emotional, nostalgic instrumental score exploring Bardot’s lost childhood, a subject deeply examined in the film. But just as striking is the reimagining of Bardot’s iconic songs by the group Madame Monsieur and other musicians.
“Brigitte Bardot is part of the DNA of all French people,” explains Jean-Karl Lucas of Madame Monsieur. “We’re all born with her myth. A myth that still exists through her image, her music, her films, her combat for animals. I have the impression of having grown up with her, even though I was born in the 1980s.”
His partner Émilie Satt is more direct: “I have turned the question in every direction – she remains the greatest pop icon of the 20th century. She embodies the image of feminine sensuality. She is the one and only sun, even more luminous than Marilyn Monroe in my opinion. It almost hurts your eyes to see someone so beautiful, with so much aura.”
Video via Brigitte Bardot YouTube channel
What Remains
The documentary consumed years and involved massive archival research, “hectoliters of archives,” as Bary puts it, with the risk of getting lost. The team gained access to unpublished Bardot family archives and partnered with Paris Match for photograph selection. Multiple editors tackled the colossal material. Graphiste Gilles Pointeau created the film’s motion-design work.
When asked to define Bardot in a single word, the three directors offer different answers. Thevenet: “Sincere.” Bary: “Contrast.” Berliner: “Free. All her life, this woman will have said things with total freedom, never compromising.”
Perhaps that’s the through-line: not her looks or movies or even animal activism, but the refusal to compromise. She said no to Hollywood. She said no to returning to cinema at her peak. She said no to being defined by others’ expectations. She said no to silence when animals needed a voice, even when speaking cost her everything. Throughout her life, she was betrayed and exploited because of her naivety and optimism. Only the animals, voiceless and vulnerable, were incapable of lies.
The woman who once triggered unprecedented global desire now lives quietly – but not silently! – in her refuge La Garrigue at the quiet outskirts of Saint-Tropez, escaping indiscreet gazes, scandals, and disappointments. “She disrupted women’s image and was ahead of ecological consciousness and animal welfare that now, finally, seem obvious to everyone,” the documentary’s synopsis reads. “A reflection on what it means to be a woman artist, a free woman, and sometimes someone ahead of her time.”
At 91, Brigitte Bardot has recently suffered from health problems, but she remains what she’s always been: impossible to categorize, impossible to possess, impossible to forget. A meteor that blazed across culture and never really burned out – it just changed what it was willing to illuminate. For those who remember the films, she’s a movie star who became an activist. For those who know the Foundation, she is an activist who happened to make movies.
Both are right. Both are incomplete. That’s precisely how she wanted it.
The documentary doesn’t solve the mystery of who Brigitte Bardot is. It does something more valuable: it lets her finally speak for herself, in her own voice, about what mattered and what didn’t, what cost her and what saved her. After fifty years of silence on personal matters, that may be the most radical act of all.
“My life has not been easy to live; it was not a long, tranquil river. But it is good when things are not easy, because you have to overcome. And I have the strength to overcome. I was born free and I will die free.”
— Brigitte Bardot
BARDOT, a TimpelPictures production, comes to Pathé cinemas in France on 3 December; check your local listings for showtimes. A worldwide release is planned for 2026. It was first presented at the 2025 Festival de Cannes and has since been shown in various film festivals.
Producer: TimpelPictures (Nicolas Bary), 2025
Writers: Elora Thevenet, Alain Berliner, Jessica Menéndez, Nicolas Bary
Directors: Elora Thevenet and Alain Berliner
Runtime: 90 min
Brigitte Bardot’s Initiatives, Actions, and Laws (1960s-2025)
This selective list demonstrates over five decades of sustained advocacy that has resulted in significant legal protections for animals in France and internationally.
All photos, videos and images as credited; lead image courtesy and © TimplePictures
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