Gabo & Cinema

James Joyce's 'Ulysses'

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, entitled "James Joyce and the making of Ulysses". Amongst those interviewed is author Anthony Burgess.

Franz Kafka's 'The Trial'

BBC documentary about Franz Kafka played by GREEK TV in 1990. This documentary is one of the ten films of “The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (1988)”.

La bisabuela tiene Alzheimer

A meeting between the daughter and the grandmother of the director, Iván Mora Manzano, at a time when the memories of one, the girl’s, were taking shape, and the other’s the grandmother’s, were vanishing. This starting point is used as a pretext to talk about other topics such as the importance of family memories and the search for memory.

Les chiens-loups

Milan Kundera: From the Joke to Insignificance

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 Art of Joy by Goliarda Sapienza: Writing for Emancipation

Between 1967 and 1976, Italian writer Goliarda Sapienza (1924-76) wrote The Art of Joy, a subversive novel about the dazzling social ascent of a rebellious heroine; too scandalous to be published at that contradictory time.

Vocation

Vocation is a documentary on artists who knew from a very early age they wanted to be an artist. A decision that for them was instinctual and some may even say it is 'a calling' based on faith and perhaps even fate alone. Artists Andy Jones, Deepa Mehta, Marie Brassard, Christopher Pratt, Brad Peyton and Bif Naked are committed to creating work in theatre, literature, music, film and performance based on an innate desire to succeed while working in the precarious profession of art.

The Satanic Verses Affair

Twenty years ago, novelist Salman Rushdie was a wanted man with a million pound bounty on his head. His novel, The Satanic Verses, had sparked riots across the Muslim world. The ailing religious leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, had invoked a little-known religious opinion - a fatwa - and effectively sentenced Rushdie to death. This film looks back on the extraordinary events which followed the publication of the book and the ten year campaign to get the fatwa lifted. Interviews with Rushdie's friends and family and testimony from leaders of Britain's Muslim community and the Government reveal the inside story of the affair.

A rebelión da lectura

In Search of Dracula

Mark Gatiss explores and celebrates Dracula, an icon of popular culture, asking just why we keep coming back to the count.

The Last Bookshop of The World

The documentary is a true story of four real intellectual Europeans from different cultures who are worried about the decline of literature’s life and the destiny of the street level bookshops in every country. That is why they have a mission to save symbolically “the world's last quality books”.

Hello My Dear

The documentary is titled after Arkadaş Z. Özger’s poem “Hello My Dear” which had caused much controversy in the period it was first published. Considered to be in defiance of heteronormativity, the said poem includes references to the poet’s personality, his family, his relationship to the society, and his “unexpected” death, which came three years after its publication. Today, 50 years after it was written, the documentary follows these same lines in the poem utilising cinematic elements. The documentary also rediscovers the poetics; reaches out to the family, the comrades, the friendships, departing from the official historical accounts, cognizant of his experience of otherness, in pursuit of the “lost” portrait of Arkadaş Z. Özger.

Escape to Life: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story

This documentary contains dramatized episodes about the lives of Erika and Klaus Mann, the brilliant children of German writer Thomas Mann.

Jean de la Fontaine and His Fables

An account of the life of the French poet Jean de la Fontaine (1621-95), author of more than one hundred fables and a model for many other European fabulists of later times.

Gerais da Pedra

Intemperie. La experiencia de Armando Rojas Guardia

This documentary takes us on a sensorial and atmospheric journey through the experiences, words and thoughts of the Venezuelan essayist and poet Armando Rojas Guardia. His early connection with the divine, the gradual inner maturation of a mystical experience that he manages to glimpse in his early adulthood, the determining and complex influence of his father (also a writer), his first crush on a young high school classmate, the profound experience of homoeroticism, the abysses of the psychotic crisis. All experiences pushed to the limit and which make up some of the singular elements of a unique artistic and intellectual quest with a broad universal scope.

I Am Joke, Said Joke

Documentary about the Dutch author, illustrator and performer Joke van Leeuwen, who has won various awards for her literature for children which sometimes uses a quest as a theme.

Edward Abbey, naturellement subversif !

A resistance writer and pioneer of nature writing with a controversial personality, Edward Abbey wrote more than twenty books on the theme of eternal nature. A gem of counterculture, his 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang inspired a generation of environmental activists and readers with rebellious souls. Portrait of a rebellious, lyrical, and rude writer.

I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel

On the first day of shooting, James Franco, David Shields, and Caleb Powell throw out the script when a real-life argument breaks out between the three of them about what can and can't be used in the film. Shields and Franco browbeat Powell to sacrifice everything for the sake of the film; Powell threatens to leave; Shields feels guilty about betraying Powell; and Franco wants Shields and Powell to confess all for the sake of the film. A debate, nearly to the death, about life and art.

England: Background of Literature

Takes students to England to show them the land that inspired many great writers... the London of Chaucer, Dickens and Browning...the countryside which was so meaningful to Shakespeare, Keates, Wordsworth and Kipling...and the sea as Coleridge, Conrad and Masefield wrote of it.