Paris, October 1925: packed crowds discover 19-year-old Josephine Baker in La Revue nègre. A star is born!

Gérard Bonal adopts a personal, almost sentimental approach to his impressionistic portrait of the "black Venus," taking readers from Baker's destitute upbringing in St. Louis, Missouri all the way to her fight for civil rights beside Martin Luther King. Board a liner bound for Europe with her in 1925, for what she hopes will be a one-way escape from suffering and segregation. See her escorted on a lover's arm through Paris by night in the Roaring Twenties, a city of music halls: the Casino de Paris, the Folies Bergère, the nightclubs of Pigalle. Watch as the iconic celebrity joins the secret service on the side of Free France in 1941.