Christian Boltanski started exhibiting in Germany in the early 1970s and has today gained worldwide recognition for his art. He has been awarded the Goslar “Kaiserring” and the Japanese “Praemium Imperiale”, often referred to as the Nobel Prize in Art. The film The Possible Lives of Christian Boltanski plunges us into a sombre yet humorous universe, around the world in Paris, Berlin and Japan. It portrays works which are monumental yet little known, as often hidden in locked basements or far-away sites. The film also contains previously unaired archive footage, confronting the artist with his own past and future. Christian Boltanski talks of his true and possible lives, of humanism, religion and utopia, and explains his major project Archives of the Heart that will bring together tens of thousands of heartbeats in a remote place, somewhere between the island of Utopia and the beyond.