Prospero's Books

Five hundred years after his birth, the life and career of the Italian Renaissance's last great painter is explored.

A short film based on the work of choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker.

When churlish mobster Albert Spica acquires an upscale French restaurant in London, he dines there nightly, effectively scaring off the clientele with his bad manners. His wife, Georgina, is especially disgusted by him, and soon begins an affair with regular guest Michael. Despite their best efforts to keep it secret, Spica learns about their trysts, and he plots a terrible revenge.

R. Neville, a brash young draftsman, is hired to make a dozen landscape illustrations at the estate of Mr Herbert and his wife Virginia. Aside from monetary compensation, the arrangement includes a sexual liaison offered to Neville by Virginia while her estranged husband is away. But when the murdered body of Mr Herbert is discovered at the estate, mysterious clues found in Neville's drawings point to the identity of the killer.

Cissie Colpitts drowns her cheating husband and, in the ensuing cover-up, enlists the help of lonely coroner Henry Madgett, an old friend with a longstanding weakness for her charms. But when Cissie's daughter and granddaughter—both also named Cissie Colpitts—decide to resort to the same methods for solving conflicts with their own frustrating husbands, the women and their repeated appeals for help begin to wear on Madgett's conscience.

Identical twin zoologists lose their wives in a car crash caused by a white swan. They become obsessed with the death and decay of animals, and develop a strange and unusual relationship with the driver of the car, a woman who is now an amputee.

Can a dog still be man’s best friend if that man is the Führer? Blondi explores the bizarre bond between Hitler and his beloved German Shepherd. From eating the crumbs under the table at the Führer’s birthday, to living in the confinement of the bunker, this film presents intimate glimpses of the dog’s daily life intertwined with the realities of war, depicting the oblivious pet's surreal impact on the Reich.

A TV Dante is an experimental mini-series directed by Tom Phillips and legendary filmmaker Peter Greenaway. It covers eight of the thirty-four cantos in Dante Alighieri's Inferno, part of his 14th century epic poem The Divine Comedy. The eight cantos of the film are not conventionally dramatised, rather they are illuminated with layered and juxtaposed imagery while the text is read entirely in "talking head" fashion, and punctuated with a kaleidoscopic blend of both newly shot and archival footage.

Stourley Kracklite, a driven, detail-obsessed architect, travels from America to Rome with his much younger wife, Louisa, to oversee an architectural homage to a personal hero, 18th-century master builder Etienne-Louis Boullée. En route by train, Stourley and Louisa conceive a much-wanted child — but Stourley's obsession with his wife's expanding belly, her perceived infidelity, and his own recurrent bouts of abdominal pain reach epic and dangerous proportions.

In 17th-century Tuscany, a church play is performed for the benefit of young aristocrat Cosimo. In the play, a grotesque old woman gives birth to a beautiful baby boy. The child's older sister is quick to exploit the situation, selling blessings from the baby, and even claiming she's the true mother by virgin birth. However, when she attempts to seduce the bishop's son, the Church exacts a terrible revenge.

J'accuse is an 'essay-istic' documentary in which Greenaway's fierce criticism of today's visual illiteracy is argued by means of a forensic search of Rembrandt's Nightwatch. Greenaway explains the background, the context, the conspiracy, the murder and the motives of all its 34 painted characters who have conspired to kill for their combined self-advantage. Greenaway leads us through Rembrandt's paintings into 17th century Amsterdam. He paints a world that is democratic in principle, but is almost entirely ruled by twelve families. The notion exists of these regents as charitable and compassionate beings. However, reality was different.

Nagito has a fetish for calligraphy on the human body and meets her ideal soulmate Jerome, an English translator sent to Japan. However, once Nagiko's father's gay publisher rejoins the scene, the story is overtaken by treachery and bloodlust.

40 international directors were asked to make a short film using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière Brothers, working under conditions similar to those of 1895. There were three rules: (1) The film could be no longer than 52 seconds, (2) no synchronized sound was permitted, and (3) no more than three takes.

An extravagant, exotic and moving look at Rembrandt's romantic and professional life, and the controversy he created by the identification of a murderer in the painting The Night Watch.

Goltzius and the Pelican Company tells the story of Hendrik Goltzius, a late 16th century Dutch printer and engraver of erotic prints. A contemporary of Rembrandt and, indeed, more celebrated during his life, Goltzius seduces the Margrave of Alsace into paying for a printing press to make and publish illustrated books. In return, he promises him an extraordinary book of pictures of illustrating the Old Testament’s biblical stories. Erotic tales of Lot and his daughters, David and Bathsheba, Samson and Deliah and John the Baptist and Salome. To tempt the Margrave further, Goltzius and his printing company will offer to perform dramatisations of these erotic stories for his court.

In 1931, following the success of the film Battleship Potemkin, Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein travels to the city of Guanajuato, Mexico, to shoot a new film. Freshly rejected by Hollywood, Eisenstein soon falls under Mexico’s spell. Chaperoned by his guide Palomino Cañedo, the director opens up to his suppressed fears as he embraces a new world of sensual pleasures and possibilities that will shape the future of his art.