Wechselspiel – Wenn Peter Stamm schreibt

Rosine

In his exploration of the cultural dynamic between East and West, Adolf Muschg, the most significant Swiss writer since Frisch and Dürrenmatt, searched for the other in himself in order to understand otherness.

Étienne Dinet (إتيان دينيه), born March 28, 1861 in Paris, where he died on December 24, 1929, was a French painter and lithographer. He was one of the leading representatives of Orientalist painting at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Obtaining a scholarship in 1884, Dinet undertook his first trip to southern Algeria in the region of Bou-Saâda, the Naili culture having a profound impact on him, as he would return there many times until he settled in his first Algerian studio in Biskra in 1900. In 1905, he bought a house in Bou-Saâda to spend three-quarters of the year there. In 1907, on his advice, the Villa Abd-el-Tif was created in Algiers, modeled on the Villa Medici in Rome. Having lived much of his life in Algeria, he called himself Nasreddine Dinet (نصر الدين ديني) after converting to Islam. On January 12, 1930, he was buried in the Bou-Saâda cemetery, where a museum that houses many of his works bears his name.

Prolific writer Joyce Carol Oates has remained intensely private. Until now. Through a long-standing friendship, and persistent inquiry, director Stig Bjorkman is granted unprecedented access to document her mornings of longhand writing, her walks with her husband—to visit her within her solitude.

A documentary about the production of From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and the people who made it.

A cinematic impression of Vietnam, told through the eyes of Vietnamese immigrants.

A radio DJ in pursuit of an exclusive interview follows ABBA during their mega-successful tour of Australia.

Colosseum: A Gladiator's Story

A short documentary about a reclusive writer.

L'angoisse du héron

M'hamed Issiakhem (Kabyle: Mḥemmed Isyaxem; Arabic: محمد إسياخم)—born on June 17, 1928, in Taboudoucht (Aghribs), then part of the Tizi Ouzou Department in Algeria, and who died on December 1, 1985, in Algiers—was an Algerian painter and a leading figure of modern painting in Algeria. In 1943, he handled a grenade stolen from a US military camp, and it exploded; two of his sisters and a nephew were killed. Hospitalized for two years, he underwent the amputation of his left arm. From 1947 to 1951, he studied in Algiers, first at the Société des Beaux-Arts and later at the École des Beaux-Arts. "A country without artists is a dead country... I hope we are alive..." These words were spoken in a film by Fawzi Sahraoui—produced by the RTA in 1985 and shot just months before the painter M'hamed Issiakhem passed away. It is a fascinating docudrama in which Issiakhem opens up with subtlety, passion, and generosity.

The documentary story of Harlan Ellison

12 years later, a failed school short film is resignified to share the multiple experiences that exist in the creation of a film.

In his lifetime, Thomas Merton was hailed as a prophet and censured for his outspoken social criticism. For nearly 27 years he was a monk of the austere Trappist order, where he became an eloquent spiritual writer and mystic as well as an anti-war advocate and witness to peace. Merton: A Film Biography provides the first comprehensive look at this remarkable 20th century religious philosopher who wrote, in addition to his immensely popular autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, over 60 books on some of the most pressing social issues of our time, some of which are excerpted here. Merton offers an engaging profile of a man whose presence in the world touched millions of people and whose words and thoughts continue to have a profound impact and relevance today.

Tired of my city, I imagine the arrival of a cowboy in Lisbon.

Robert van Gulik (1910–1967) served as a diplomat, collected Chinese lutes and invented Judge Dee, yet his own country barely remembers him. Rob Rombout travels from the Netherlands to Indonesia, Japan, the United States and China, through diaries, archives and the people van Gulik still haunts. Somewhere between biography and detective story, the man and his hero merge.

The Hugo's Brain is a French documentary-drama about autism. The documentary crosses authentic autistic stories with a fiction story about the life of an autistic (Hugo), from childhood to adulthood, portraying his difficulties and his handicap.

Ondřej Sekora – Práce všeho druhu

After Portnoy's Complaint launched him as a new literary voice, not to mention a scandalous one, Philip Roth went on to be hailed by many as America's greatest living writer. Never afraid to look hard at the extremes of human experience, he has been both consistently controversial and intensely private. But now, having celebrated his 80th birthday in his home town of Newark, New Jersey, Roth, in conversation with Alan Yentob, is ready to tell the whole story in this special two-part film for imagine... Philip Roth Unleashed.

"All Five Millions of Us" is a hybrid of documentary and fiction feature film about father absence, based on data released by the National Council of Justice: there are 5.5 million children without paternal recognition in Brazil.