Ján Literát

A Season of Giants

November 1990 •English

At the turn of the sixteenth century, Michelangelo (Mark Frankel), Raphael (Andrea Prodan), and Leonardo Da Vinci (John Glover) create their masterpieces, while dealing with religious persecution, political turmoil, and the discovery of America.

Käthe Kollwitz – Pictures of a Life

April 1987 •German

Kathe Kollwitz was 47 years old, and already a well established artist in Germany and abroad when Peter, her youngest son, volunteered to join the German army in WWI and was killed two weeks later. This painful tragedy changed Kollwitz's life and art forever.

The Eddie Cantor Story

December 1953 •English

Film biography of entertainer Eddie Cantor, with Keefe Brasselle starring as the popular stage, radio and movie comic.

Taghiyev: Oil

November 2024 •Azerbaijani

A history written with tears and oil... The life story of the great philanthropist Haji Zeynalabdin Taghiyev.

Tucker: The Man and His Dream

August 1988 •English

Ypsilanti, Michigan, 1945. Engineer Preston Tucker dreams of designing the car of future, but his innovative envision will be repeatedly sabotaged by his own unrealistic expectations and the Detroit automobile industry tycoons.

Sylvia

October 2003 •English

Story of the relationship between the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.

Heinrich Heine

January 1978 •German

For a Lost Soldier

September 1992 •Dutch

In the occupied Netherlands near the end of WWII, a young teenager, Jeroen Boman (Maarten Smit) is sent to the Dutch countryside to avoid the war in Amsterdam. While living with his adopted family, Jeroen meets and becomes friends with a Canadian soldier named Walt Cook, who is stationed at the same town he is staying at. Joroen and Walt spend a lot of time playing around and eventually a romantic relationship develops between them. The boy’s sexual curiosity leads him to have a sexual experience with Walt, an encounter that is shown with some vague detail but without actually showing any nudity, even though sexual intimacy between the two of them is implied. Overall, the movie handles this difficult subject with an elegant style and feeling, without having the adult-child relationship overwhelm the viewer and thus allowing the movie to be seen as just a wartime relationship between two people that marks an important time in a young boy’s life.

Lenny

November 1974 •English

The story of acerbic 1960s comic Lenny Bruce, whose groundbreaking, no-holds-barred style and social commentary was often deemed by the establishment as too obscene for the public.

Dillinger

July 1973 •English

After a shoot-out kills five FBI agents in Kansas City the Bureau target John Dillinger as one of the men to hunt down. Waiting for him to break Federal law they sort out several other mobsters, while Dillinger's bank robbing exploits make him something of a folk hero. Escaping from jail he finds Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson have joined the gang and pretty soon he is Public Enemy Number One. Now the G-men really are after him.

Walker

December 1987 •English

William Walker and his mercenary corps enter Nicaragua in the middle of the 19th century in order to install a new government by a coup d'etat.

The Pit and the Pendulum

August 1961 •English

In the sixteenth century, Francis Barnard travels to Spain to clarify the strange circumstances of his sister's death after she had married the son of a cruel Spanish Inquisitor.

André Chénier

February 1910 •French

The life of French poet André Chénier, precursor of the Romantic movement, who was guillotined during the Revolution aged only 31.

François Villon: The Maverick Poet

January 1987 •Romanian

The film is a novelized biography of François Villon (1431-1463), known as the Wandering Poet, who led a troubled life due to the fact that he supported the free expression of people in a coercive climate.

Inés de Castro

December 1944 •Spanish

In 1336, Pedro, heir to the Portuguese crown, marries Constanza Manuel de Villena, a Castilian noblewoman, for political reasons; but the impulsive prince ends up giving in to his love for Inés de Castro, his wife's lady-in-waiting.

The Labour and Rose

December 1962 •Azerbaijani

The film is about famous Chechen ballet and folk dancer Mahmud Essembayev's life.

El Noa Noa

February 1981 •Spanish

Juan Gabriel became one of the most popular Mexican singer-songwriters, beginning his career in this Ciudad Juárez cabaret. This is his story.

Francisco Boix: A Photographer in Hell

January 2000 •Spanish

In 1939, just finished the Spanish Civil War, Spanish republican photographer Francesc Boix escapes from Spain; but is captured by the Nazis in 1940 and imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp, in Austria, a year later. There, he works as a prisoner in the SS Photographic Service, hiding, between 1943 and 1945, around 20,000 negatives that later will be presented as evidence during several trials conducted against Nazi war criminals after World War II.

The Vow

July 1946 •Russian

The story of Stalin and the Soviet people.

Amália

December 2008 •Portuguese

You already know the legendary singer. For the first time, you'll get to know the woman behind the myth. The story of singing legend Amália Rodrigues who ruled the famous Portuguese acoustic guitar and vocals based music genre called fado.