Béla Bartók

Running through Bartók’s disenchanted tale, whose haunting music was initially condemned as unplayable, and the expression of despair in Poulenc’s monologue, the director Krzysztof Warlikowski perceives a shared dramatic thread, a shared feminine consciousness and a shared sense of imprisonment and suffocation: for the woman who penetrates the confines of Bluebeard’s castle and Elle, the woman who clings to a telephone conversation with a man as the only thing worth living for, are condemned to share the same fate. And this man she speaks to, does he really exist? Unless the director has interpreted Cocteau’s words to the letter and the telephone has become a “terrifying weapon that leaves no trace, makes no noise”…

Snow is suspended. It becomes rare. The wonder is in peril. The extraordinary atmosphere which it induces and which suspends the stifled daily life, moves away from our impatience. Snow is a curtain behind which capitalist issues are going on, the consequences of which are universal and global. Nivose is an attempt to reverse the movement, to fix and revive by abstraction a climatic phenomenon so far condemned by mankind in a process that could be inescapable. Magic operates when the camera catches the flakes in the opposite direction.

Valery Gergiev conducts Mariusz Trelinski’s thrilling new production of these rarely heard one-act operas. Anna Netrebko stars as the blind princess of the title in Tchaikovsky’s lyrical work, opposite Piotr Beczala as Vaudémont, the man who wins her love—and wakes her desire to be able to see. Nadja Michael and Mikhail Petrenko are Judith and Bluebeard in Bartók’s gripping psychological thriller about a woman discovering her new husband’s murderous past.

The Ghost Sonata relates the adventures of a young student, who idealizes the lives of the inhabitants of a stylish apartment building in Stockholm. He makes the acquaintance of the mysterious Jacob Hummel, who helps him to find his way into the apartment, only to find that it is a nest of betrayal and sickness. The world, the student learns, is hell and human beings must suffer to achieve salvation.

In the beginning was the image of a refrigerator which had been left on the staircase of a tenement building. I needed an additional incentive to lure the tenants out of their apartments. An everyday object, ordinary like a refrigerator. Milkbottles.

In Hoppla!, two choreographies by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker are brought together and performed to the music of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók: Mikrokosmos, seven short works for two pianos, and Quatuor no. 4, Bartók’s fourth string quartet. The reading room of the Ghent University library, designed by the renowned architect Henry Van de Velde, serves as location.

Bartok's creepy and ravishing opera on film.

Documentary about the Belgian surrealist artist who died in 1967.

Perhaps this is Robert Vas' most personal film; a portrait of his country - Hungary - as seen through the eyes of an exile. Robert Vas escaped from his homeland after the brutal crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising by the Russians and he was never able to return. He portrays his country through the writings of Hungary's national poets and illustrates the film with images of the Revolution and of the society it would become in the years immediately following 1956. The film was transmitted on the 20th anniversary of the crushing of the uprising.

Un anciano le paga a una mujer para que viva como si fuese su esposa, hasta que un día descubre que ella se acuesta con su hijo. (ZOOWOMAN)

Protesting youngsters chant slogans such as “Johnson murderer” and sing “Murderer, many people are being killed”. It is the late sixties. In his film, Van der Keuken presents his visual view of the changes in the mentality of a growing group of young people in Western society. He films youngsters who paint their faces and react against the monotonous lives of pen-pushers and civil servants. Their attitude exudes resistance against existing social structures.Van der Keuken exchanges images of protest marches that occasionally get out of hand with charming pictures of nature. He said the following about this film: “In the case of these youngsters, the surrounding violence is turned inside, as it were, and directed at the exploration of personal observations.” (idfa.nl)

Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound , finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.

Based on the Bela Bartok opera, Bluebeard woos his women and then swiftly disposes of them.

A young doctor undergoes a spiritual crisis when he returns to his rural home.

An early short film by Liliana Cavani that confronts the theme of discrimination.