Emperor Francis Joseph I is about to arrive in Prague, and among those who came to Stromovka to welcome him is Veronika Pavlitová. She wants to submit a request for clemency for her imprisoned father to the emperor, because she is barely able to support herself and her siblings on the meager...
Getting out of prison doesn't mean being free. After the bloody suppression of the Prague Revolution in 1848, one of its participants, the writer František Vinický, spent eight years in prison. Returning to Prague in 1857, he tries to make contact with his former friends. The main one is his...
Parisian courtesan, Violetta meets the romantic aristocrat Alfredo and finds herself in love for the first time. She abandons her frivolous lifestyle to be with him but his father Germont, charged by the hypocrisy of upper-class society, threatens their future.
Every day, Paris’ six railway stations welcome over 3,000 trains and more than a million travelers coming from France and all over Europe. The stations’ sizes are impressive: Gare du Nord is bigger than the Louvre or Notre-Dame de Paris. These railway stations are architectural landmarks and a...
A 1995 Opera Australia performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's classic operetta, recorded at the Sydney Opera House. Bunthorne, a poet worshiped by every lady he meets, loves only one woman: Patience. But Patience does not share the other women's fascination with Bunthorne. She loves Archibald, her...
This remarkable series of 10 short silent dramas by John M. Stahl, produced by Benjamin Chapin as a vehicle for his performance as Abraham Lincoln, are structured entirely around memory and recollections of the past.
Romantic art was a response to the social upheavals of the 19th century, as shown by works by its emblematic painters Friedrich, Venetsianov and Delacroix.
Bucharest, 1876. Don Dumitrache instructs his trusted man, Chiriac, to watch his young wife, Veta. Dumitrache is sure that Veta having an affair, she does not know is that her lover is Chiriac own...
Capt. Eugenio arrives in a remote castle to take charge of a unit guarding a nameless prisoner. No one knows much about the inmate as he is held in a forlorn tower. When the captain's wife Adele tries to shake her melancholia by playing the piano, she finds -- much to her surprise -- that she's...
In 1827, Joseph Smith, Jr. was only 21 years old when he received a prophetic calling to translate ancient scriptures that would soon be published as The Book of Mormon. Less than three years later, he founded The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that today has 14 million followers and...
Two poor farmers spend all their money on a chicken, while waiting for her first egg they slowly start to get the feeling there’s something very wrong with the animal.
Against the backdrop of New York City of the early 1850s, a young woman -- naively seeking to win the love she reads about in the romance novels she devours -- finds one prospect in an earnest denizen of the Bowery, and another in an elegant young aristocrat. Focusing on the bygone era's fashions,...