Smetana

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.

Ghosts

June 2014 •English

Helene Alving leads an outwardly contented life. On the eve of the 10th anniversary of her husband's death, she is about to open an orphanage as a memorial to him. To mark this occasion, her bohemian painter son Oswald has returned from Paris. Helene plans to take the opportunity to tell Oswald the truth about his father. But ghosts of the past erupt during an eventful evening, bringing the facade of civilised family life crashing down.

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.

La Vie de Bohème

February 1992 •French

Three penniless artists become friends in modern-day Paris: Rodolfo, an Albanian painter with no visa, Marcel, a playwright and magazine editor with no publisher, and Schaunard, a post-modernist composer of execrable noise.

Heinrich Heine

January 1978 •German

The Revenant

December 2015 •English

In the 1820s, a frontiersman, Hugh Glass, sets out on a path of vengeance against those who left him for dead after a bear mauling.

The Earrings of Madame de...

September 1953 •French

In late 19th century France, the Countess Louise, wife of a wealthy general, sells the earrings her husband gave her on their wedding day to pay off her secret debts, then claims to have lost them. Her husband quickly learns of the deceit, which is the beginning of many tragic misunderstandings, all involving the earrings, the general, the countess, and her new lover, the Italian Baron Donati.

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.

Anna Karenina

November 1961 •English

Anna, the wife of government minister Alexei Karenin, visits Moscow to help straighten out a family quarrel. There, Count Alexei Vronsky falls in love with her. Television adaptation of a play based on Leo Tolstoy's novel by Marcelle Maurette.

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.

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.

American Coup: Wilmington 1898

October 2024 •English

The little-known story of a deadly race massacre and carefully orchestrated insurrection in North Carolina’s largest city in 1898 — the only coup d’état in the history of the US. Stoking fears of 'Negro Rule', self-described white supremacists used intimidation and violence to destroy Black political and economic power and overthrow Wilmington’s democratically-elected, multi-racial government. Black residents were murdered and thousands were banished. The story of what happened in Wilmington was suppressed for decades until descendants and scholars began to investigate. Today, many of those descendants — Black and white — seek the truth about this intentionally buried history.

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.

The Labour and Rose

December 1962 •Azerbaijani

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