The film tells the story of orphan boy Ivan, twelve years old. It is the middle of WWII in Russia. He joins the soviet army and does reconnaissance work for the military. He is able to get through small cracks where adults could not, both because of his small physical size and the fact that no one would suspect a boy of doing such work. During one mission, Ivan disappears. I...
Two men, a sledge, a barren winter landscape and the eternal struggle for existence and power.
In a suspended, dreamlike space, symbolic elements and characters made out of baling wire and colored with tempera run after each other, frame after frame. A firstborn and his newborn brother in the eternal fight for survival which usually begins when the newborn arrives and everything changes.
The clerk Joseph K. wakes up in the morning and finds the police in his room. They tell him that he is on trial but nobody tells him what he is accused of. In order to find out about the reason of this accusation and to protest his innocence, he tries to look behind the facade of the judicial system, but since this remains fruitless, there seems to be no chance for him to e...
The film is loosely based on the life of Andrei Rublev (1370-1430), the great 15th-century Russian icon painter and is set during the turbulent period following the Mongol invasion of Russia. Andrej is a young monk, a iconographer, wandering to look for a job around churches and monasteries in Russia. He is convinced that in his life there is only space for art and religion....
Johnny Barrett, an ambitious journalist of the Globe, is determined to win a Pulitzer Prize by writing a front page article. Together with the director of the newspaper, he plans to solve a murder committed in a lunatic asylum and witnessed only by three inmates, from whom the police have been unable to extract the information. With the connivance of a psychiatrist, and the ...
The film follows Tome's life from the war to the beginning of the 60s'. Grown up in the north to a family of poor farmers, Tome has always been put upon in working and sexually abused. Nobuko, her daughter, is born from a one-night stand. Following a failed marriage, Tome moves to a city and finds her own independence working first as a worker and maid and after as a prosti...
Orville works as a piano teacher and songwriter in a small town. One day, he finds himself obliged to host a famous singer and renowned Don Juan in his house. This might be the chance to make him listen to his songs and become rich, but the risk that he could seduce his wife is too big. To protect her, Orville prepares a set-up: he replaces his unaware wife with the docile w...
Hiraoka breaks into Riichi's house, while he is away with his son, and he raped his wife. She decides to commit suicide but not before having seen her son for the last time. When her husband is back, Sadako can't find the courage to tell him what happened. Two days after, while Riichi is visiting his lover and colleague, Hiraoka breaks into his house again and Sadako takes a...
Dreyer's final film is a Danish drama based on the 1906 play of the same name by Hjalmar Söderberg. Gertrud, unhappily married with a lawyer and politician, meets first her former lover, a famous poet, then starts a relation with a young composer and eventually ends up living alone. Thirty years later, Gertrud looks back at her life. She says that love is the only thing that...
