Das Haus der guten Geister

BBC documentary exploring the dynamic relationship that developed between British composer Benjamin Britten and the BBC as they worked together to broadcast modern classical music further and wider. Through this collaboration, Britten's music reached television audiences, from elaborately staged studio operas to intimate duets featuring his partner Peter Pears to the massive Proms performance of his War Requiem. The programme features interviews with Britten's collaborators and singers as well as those working behind the scenes including Michael Crawford, David Attenborough, Humphrey Burton and soprano April Cantelo. James Naughtie narrates.

A 12-year-old boy tries everything to join a music lovers club.

Kirby Dick's provocative documentary investigates the secretive and inconsistent process by which the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rates films, revealing the organization's underhanded efforts to control culture. Dick questions whether certain studios get preferential treatment and exposes the discrepancies in how the MPAA views sex and violence.

Imagine a window into the past. Imagine finally connecting singers' bodies to the voices you have always treasured on record, watching footage of performances from another era. All of singers featured here have something in common (with one exception, Sutherland): they sang and performed on stage before the advent of filmed opera. . And it shows, for the first time, a few tantalizing minutes of recently recovered footage from Callas' legendary Lisbon Traviata, featuring Addio dal Passato and Parigi oh cara with Alfredo Kraus. This DVD will leave you asking for more.

Bashar al-Assad's regime fell on december 8, 2024. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) reveals the mistreatment endured by journalists under his bloodthirsty regime. According to the NGO, 181 journalists were killed under his rule.

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Click for full movie details & trailers.

Released in 1796 posthumously, The Nun, a novel that Diderot did not dream of publishing during his lifetime, as he knew it to be revolutionary, caused the same explosion in the 19th century France as in that of the 1960s, when Jacques Rivette decided to adapt it, with Anna Karina in the title role. “This film is banned and it will remain so!” said the General de Gaulle. Exploration of an indictment of incredible modernity which, through the tragedy of the young Suzanne, locked up in the convent against her will, denounces the inequity of a society denying women all moral, political and sexual freedom.

A retrospective documentary about the groundbreaking horror series, Friday the 13th, featuring interviews with cast and crew from the twelve films spanning 3 decades.

In their songs, comedy and exuberant music, a travelling theatre company give a fiercely polemic account of Scottish history, from the aftermath of Culloden to the oil boom. Their production before a live audience is intercut with filmed reconstructions of the Highland Clearances and the Victorian obsession with hunting stags.

The history of Bruguera, the most important comic publisher in Spain between the 1940s and the 1980s. How the characters created by great writers and pencilers became Spanish archetypes and how their strips persist nowadays as a portrait of Spain and its people. The daily life of the creators and the founding family, the Brugueras. The world in which hundreds of vivid colorful paper beings lived and still live, in the memory of millions, in the smile of everyone.

OBAIDA, a short film by Matthew Cassel, explores a Palestinian child’s experience of Israeli military arrest. Each year, some 700 Palestinian children undergo military detention in a system where ill-treatment is widespread and institutionalized. For these young detainees, few rights are guaranteed, even on paper. After release, the experience of detention continues to shape and mark former child prisoners’ path forward.

Documentary film that follows Silvana Castro, a woman who works at the National Congress Library in Argentina where the books that were forbidden during the military dictatorship are kept. After the exhibition of the books is suspended, she'll try to open it again.

A 2002 live performance of Mikel Rouse's Dennis Cleveland, a multimedia opera set entirely on a television talk show in the late 20th century.

About a group of door-to-door salesman who try to sell vacuum cleaners from "Vorwerk", a German manufacturer.

A documentary about the cultural effect of film censorship, focusing on the tumultuous times of the teens and early 1920s in America.

Serge Kakudji is a twenty-year-old Congolese counter tenor who fell in love with opera as a young boy, listening to audiotapes of opera recordings in his room in Lubumbashi. Later he traveled to Europe to achieve his dream of becoming a top opera singer. Although Serge's artistic ambitions are pure and uncomplicated, the reactions among his environment and audiences are often ambiguous and divided. While some people respect and acknowledge his artistic vocation, others see him as an exotic oddity, or complain that that his African timbre jars with classical opera. Serge refuses to be discouraged by any of this. On the contrary, he wants to hold up a mirror to Western culture and confront it with its underlying beliefs. He also wants to use his story and experiences in the west to bring opera to Congo. Together with his countrymen and women, he wants to found a Congolese opera tradition based on African stories that will inspire people to follow their dreams.

Described in the 70’s as "A Chorus Line for gay people," Crimes Against Nature remains vital today as a communal disclosure of roles that gay people adopt in order to survive in a world that devalues homosexual feelings. It features individual actors delivering revealing monologues, during which the other members of the collective play background roles (parents, schoolmates, etc.). One by one, the actors detail the ways in which they have buried their true selves in order to survive and be accepted in the world: repression, drug use, shyness, being agreeable, putting experiences into "little boxes," acting "butch," and so on.

A young pair from Stuttgart fly to Shanghai to hop aboard the textile business of his father while she prepares for the birth of their son. A story about the ever more common movement of Germans into the East for professional gain.

Arabella, Op. 79, is a lyric comedy or opera in three acts by Richard Strauss to a German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, their sixth and last operatic collaboration.