Visionary artist Matthew Barney returns to cinema with this 3-part epic, a radical reinvention of Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings. In collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney combines traditional modes of narrative cinema with filmed elements of performance, sculpture, and opera, reconstructing Mailer’s hypersexual story of Egyptian gods and the seven stages of reincarnation, alongside the rise and fall of the American car industry.
In 1896, three survivors of a whaling ship-wreck in the Canadian Arctic are saved and adopted by an Eskimo tribe but frictions arise when the three start misbehaving.
In 19th century England, Count Dracula travels to London and meets Mina Harker, a young woman who appears as the reincarnation of his lost love.
Disciplined Italian composer Antonio Salieri becomes consumed by jealousy and resentment towards the hedonistic and remarkably talented young Viennese composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Wounded Civil War soldier John Dunbar tries to commit suicide—and becomes a hero instead. As a reward, he's assigned to his dream post, a remote junction on the Western frontier, and soon makes unlikely friends with the local Sioux tribe.
Nathan Algren is an American hired to instruct the Japanese army in the ways of modern warfare, which finds him learning to respect the samurai and the honorable principles that rule them. Pressed to destroy the samurai's way of life in the name of modernization and open trade, Algren decides to become an ultimate warrior himself and to fight for their right to exist.
A vampire relates his epic life story of love, betrayal, loneliness, and dark hunger to an over-curious reporter.
A docudrama about four weeks in the life of famous Czech composer Antonin Dvorak. The drama - filled with many of Dvorak's compositions - begins when the composer suddenly decides to cut a concert in London and return home. While on the train, flashbacks reveal his relationship to his wife Anna and her sister Josefina. Both women gave him inspiration, yet Dvorak is clearly troubled in some way as musical excerpts come and go in his creative mind.
A narration of episodes from the life of the famous Czech poet, Karel Hynek Mácha. Throughout the film, we witness a deep analysis of Mácha's complex character (his relation to another Czech writer of the time Josef Kajetán Tyl, his unbearable jealousy, his solitude, his attitude to nature,etc.) on the well-depicted historical background with all its particularities.
Dramatic retelling of the fateful last voyage of the Nantucket whaleship Essex. When the Essex is attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in November 1820, her crew take to three fragile whalers. Alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the men must decide whether to head for the nearest islands - a thousand miles downwind to the west - or set out on an epic journey of almost three thousand miles to reach the South American mainland. Fear of cannibals forces them to choose South America. Almost three months later, the first whaler is rescued by another whaleship. Only three men are still alive. A week later the captain's whaler is also rescued, with just two men aboard. The third whaler is never found. This is a story of human endurance and what men in extremis will do to survive.
During the Turkish artistic revolution of the 1930s, a group of pioneers staged Özsoy Opera, the first opera in the history of Turkish Republic.