Movies: Dmitri Shostakovich

The Indomitable Bow is a unique portrait of Mstislav Rostropovich, a formidable personality as well as a complex, deeply political musician constantly engaged in a whirlwind of activities. Including unreleased documents, archive films, interviews and...

A young woman, married to a wealthy man, but miserably lonely; trapped within a world ruled with an iron fist. Katerina is driven by a lust for life and for love. Her husband, though, is impotent; her father-in-law a tyrant. No wonder, then, that she...

A bus travel...

In the 1920’s, The Golden Age cabaret is a favorite nightly haunt. The young fisherman Boris falls in love with Rita. He follows her to the cabaret and realizes that she is the beautiful dancer “Mademoiselle Margot,” but also the love interest of the...

Two housewives discuss philosophical themes (actually an updated dialogue between Plato and Socrates) while doing the house work. The husband of one of them rehearses his part in a theatrical play, reading a 20th century philosophical text about tota...

A political drama set in the fictional country of Illyria between 1943 and 1945, the story is about the assassination of a leading politician. The country, an ally of Nazi Germany, is on the verge of being annexed to the Eastern Bloc. Kaurismäki's T...

The above narrative, by Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic, was written into her last notebook. The places filmed show where she lived and worked during that time. It was 1942-43....

An old man reflects on his entire life. How quickly it all goes by....

An allegorical documentary about the workers of the world, whose common destinies and hopes for peace are symbolically united by the rivers that run through their respective lands. The film was shot on the Volga, the Mississippi, the Nile, the Yangtz...

An elderly couple and a younger man and woman follow up failed seduction attempts with conversation about love and the meaning of life....

From The Royal Ballet’s classical origins in the works of Petipa, to the home-grown choreographers who put British ballet on the world stage, this mixed programme highlights the versatility of the Company. Petipa’s Raymonda Act III is Russian classic...

By a twist of fate, Prince Olensky, a scholar of art history and the director of the Hermitage, is entrusted with the mission of preserving the museum's collection for Russia during the October days of 1917....

A piano duel between composers, masters and students in a musical performance that, through the active participation of the audience called upon to express themselves on the ideas, styles, stories and musical subjects confronted, transforms a working...

A man wants to flee wartime Germany and the detested Nazis to Columbia, where his brother lives. In order to achieve his goal he agrees to become an informer for the Reich....

A biopic, looking at one of the major leaders of the assassination of Czar Alexander II....

Fifty years after the death of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Gewandhaus in Leipzig is paying tribute to one of the most played composers of the 20th century with a festival entirely dedicated to him. The programme for the opening concert in the futuristic...

A dying German magnate invites his youngest son and daughter-in-law home to discuss the future of the family's shipbuilding empire. There, the daughter-in-law stumbles upon a secret of the family's Nazi past....

Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, a lurid tale of sex, murder, and corruption, premiered in 1934 and was a success until Stalin saw it two years later, resulting in a Pravda review that viciously condemned it. It was later replaced by an expurg...

A sketch: Observation of everyday life of people and situations in Vienna. "Visual art is an excellent way of observation in our culture. The everyday situations are seen briefly, continously but rarely as perceived and consciously experienced." (M...

Moments and aspects of the life of a contemporary married couple undergoing a metamorphosis....