Rights & Clearances:

We have secured the rights to Tamara de Lempicka’s artwork, family archives, and writings through Tamara de Lempicka Estate LLC and Tamara de Lempicka Productions PTY LTD.

We have also secured our E&O insurance documentation, ensuring the film is prepared for festival exhibition, theatrical screenings, museum programming, broadcast, streaming, and educational distribution.

These clearances allow us to tell Tamara’s story with rare visual access, historical depth, and the confidence of fully authorized materials.

Content and Insights:

The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & The Art of Survival offers an intimate and revealing portrait of one of the most talented artists of the 20th century. Told through Tamara’s paintings, private archives, family history, and the voices of those closest to her legacy, the film explores the woman behind the icon: an artist, survivor, mother, lover, immigrant, businesswoman, and visionary who continually reinvented herself in order to endure.

The film examines Tamara’s relationships with her family, lovers, friends, patrons, and models, while also exploring her Jewish heritage, bisexuality, exile, ambition, and extraordinary instinct for self-invention. It reveals how identity, survival, and artistic branding became inseparable from both her life and her work.

Through the director’s 19-year relationship with the de Lempicka family, the film includes rare access to family archives, home movies, scrapbooks, writings, never-before-seen drawings, paintings, and personal materials. This long-standing connection gives the documentary a uniquely personal perspective, allowing audiences to experience Tamara not only as a glamorous Art Deco figure, but as a complex woman shaped by war, displacement, desire, reinvention, and legacy.

The documentary features extraordinary contributions from world-renowned collectors, performers, curators, historians, family members, and cultural figures. Barbra Streisand granted rare access to high-resolution images from her private collection of Tamara’s most iconic paintings. Anjelica Huston shares memories of starring as Tamara in the Broadway production Tamara: The Living Movie, as well as wearing Tamara de Lempicka jewelry, given to her by Jack Nicholson, on the night she won the Academy Award for Prizzi’s Honor.

Broadway star Eden Espinosa, Tony-nominated for her starring role in Lempicka, offers insight into Tamara’s resilience, ambition, sexuality, public image, and lasting cultural relevance.

The film also features interviews with leading curators and scholars, including Gioia Mori and Furio Rinaldi of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, whose work helped shape the groundbreaking Tamara de Lempicka retrospective at the de Young Museum. Their insights illuminate Tamara’s artistic training, technique, visual language, and place within the broader history of modern art.

Additional interviews include Tamara’s granddaughter and great-granddaughters, her personal assistant, gallery owners, collectors, historians, authors, curators, and Sotheby’s Head of Auctions Scott Niichel. Discovery Channel Poland reporter Monika Krajewska provided documentation supporting Tamara’s Jewish heritage, while newly uncovered archival records — including a birth and baptism certificate — helped reveal significant new details about Tamara’s true name, birth year, and identity.

Visually, the film treats Tamara’s paintings as windows into her inner life. Through rich cinematography, animation, saturated color, archival footage, and carefully staged recreations, the documentary expands the emotional world inside her work and connects it to the defining moments of her survival.

The cinematography for all interviews was overseen by co-producer and cinematographer Svetlana Cvetko, an Academy member known for her work on the Academy Award-winning documentary Inside Job. Her visual approach gives the film its intimate, elegant, and cinematic style.

The documentary also explores Tamara’s continued influence on contemporary culture, including Broadway, fashion, celebrity collecting, music videos, digital art, and Madonna’s use of Lempicka imagery in “Open Your Heart,” “Vogue,” and her 2024 concert.

Together, these elements create a film that is not only biographical, but revelatory — a story of art, survival, identity, reinvention, and the price of becoming unforgettable.

Audience & Community

The film has cultivated a strong and engaged online audience, with more than 18,000+ followers on Instagram (18k+ followers) and more than 55,000+ followers on Facebook (55k+ followers).

This growing community reflects the wide appeal of Tamara de Lempicka’s story across art lovers, historians, collectors, Jewish and LGBTQIA+ audiences, women’s history communities, fashion and design circles, and admirers of 20th-century modernism.

Distribution and Engagement Strategy:

The film is now in an active release and engagement phase, expanding through festivals, theatrical screenings, museum programs, educational distribution, and community partnerships.

Following its festival premiere and continued screenings in the U.S. and internationally, we are focused on deepening the film’s reach through partnerships with museums, universities, Jewish cultural organizations, LGBTQIA+ communities, Art Deco societies, art schools, distributors, and streaming platforms.

We are also exploring opportunities for broader domestic and international distribution, including streaming, educational licensing, museum programming, and potential narrative adaptation. Our outreach strategy is designed to connect the film with audiences interested in art history, women’s history, Jewish identity, LGBTQIA+ stories, survival, exile, fashion, design, and 20th-century modernism.

The film’s public relations and legal efforts are supported by an experienced team, including Larsen and Associates for local public relations, a major PR firm for domestic and international marketing, and legal counsel Lisa Callif, a Hollywood Reporter Power Lawyer. Jack Lerner and his team from the UCI School of Law’s Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic have also provided legal counsel throughout the making of the film.

Through this combined festival, museum, educational, theatrical, and community engagement strategy, we aim to ensure Tamara de Lempicka’s story reaches the global audience it deserves.

Film's Unique Perspective:

The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & The Art of Survival offers a fresh and deeply personal perspective on one of the most fascinating artists of the 20th century.

Blending rare family access, historical research, authorized artwork, archival discoveries, cinematic interviews, animation, and artistic recreations, the film reveals Tamara not only as an icon of Art Deco glamour, but as a Jewish, bisexual, immigrant artist whose life was shaped by survival, reinvention, ambition, and desire.

At its heart, the film is about more than art. It is about identity, exile, resilience, and the extraordinary cost of becoming unforgettable.