In recent years, more than 2,500 books have been removed from school districts around the US, labeled as banned, restricted, or challenged, and made unavailable to millions of students. By no accident, the themes targeted are the usual scapegoats of the American Right—LGBTQ+ issues, Black...
James Baldwin was at once a major 20th century American author, a Civil Rights activist and, for two crucial decades, a prophetic voice calling Americans, black and white, to confront their shared racial tragedy.
Caseli, a young writer and teacher, creates in his imagination characters who would frequent a motel, the subject of the book he is writing. He and Dilma, his student, decide to spend a night in a motel in Rio, where eight couples meet: - Fábio, visual artist and Stefânia, fashion editor of a...
Elisabeth, a fifty year old woman, visits her old father in the outskirts of Klagenfurt. There, she reflects about her childhood and her romantic life.
From the series "The Modern World: Ten Great Writers", this playful documentary introduces James Joyce's most famous work "Ulysses". It includes fantastic adaptations to film from passages of the novel. It also includes excerpts from a book written by Joyce's friend, the artist Frank Budgen,...
The brilliant Czech writer Milan Kundera has not given an interview in thirty years; nor does he appear in public. How did he become a legendary author? What is so unique about his books?
The prodigious genesis of a monument of world literature, too often reduced to its popular success, also recounts the tormented conversion of its author, Victor Hugo, to the ideal of social progress.
An adaptation of the J.P. Sartre story "Le Mur". What goes on in his mind and what happens outside when he has left only few more hours left to live. The existential dilemmas of a prisoner condemned to death from a repressive regime for his participation in a resistance movement and his...
On a forest road in the Brandenburg March, village teacher Potsch accidentally encounters the distinguished Professor Menzel, who got stuck there in his car. In the conversation that ensues, Menzel and Pötsch quickly discover that they both are great admirers of the early 19th-century writer Max...
Hours and historical meetings, Pierre Assouline has composed an anthology of the best extracts presented in the form of a primer, which he had commented on by a surprised Bernard Pivot.
The man who invented James Bond: The story of Ian Fleming, real-life spy, ladies' man and sportsman, who was there at the birth of MI-5 and the CIA, and gave the world one of its most enduring and iconic heroes: Bond. James Bond.
A professional novelist struggles to resolve an increasingly burdensome family situation, and his relationship with his partner, all the while attempting to finish a new book that encapsulates his situation.
First film of Juan José Ponce’s trilogy about Federico García Lorca. Lunas de Nueva York looks back on Federico’s trip to New York in 1929, an essential journey for his life and career.
Borrowing from an anthropological study initiated through the University of California in 1969, The Taste of The Name is a fantasia on universality. As a parallel to the elusive “umami” and its gradual scientific acceptance as a primary taste, we consider what is perceivable, knowable, and...
England, 1960. The Crown sues the publisher Penguin Books in order to ban the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover, a novel by the British writer D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), published privately in Italy in 1928, which celebrates nature and deals with sex without taboos.
