Erato Films

Cio-Cio-San, a young Japanese geisha, seeks to fulfill her dreams through marriage to an American naval officer. Her faith in their future is shattered by his empty vows and the loss she endures touches something deep within us all.

This is 1920: Sophia and Trofim Ivanytch have been living on Vassilievski Island, which is part of Petrograd, for thirteen years. In their house, which looks like a ship wreck, the atmosphere is gloomy. Sophia cannot have children and she is aware that, because of that, she is likely to lose her husband. That is why, when their neighbor dies, she asks Trofim to take in Ganka, his orphaned thirteen-year-old daughter. Trofim agrees and their new life begins...

The story of Polish pedagogue Janusz Korczak and his dedication to protecting Jewish orphans during the war.

Paris, October 1948. Nino, Gilles, Donald, Barbara and their friends are a new breed of spectators. They discover the cinema as art, they are moviegoers. They will try to realize their grand project: to found a film club. "My film first wants to be a testimony of young people who have lived for a passion. Cinema"

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.

Each evening, four men – a doctor, a journalist, a professor and a merchant – meet up in a deserted bar to play cards. As they play, the bar’s owner, her downtrodden barman (nicknamed “le paltoquet”) and a strange woman in white watch from a distance. One night, the card game is disturbed when a police inspector suddenly appears and declares that a dead body has been found nearby. Certain that one of the four men is the murderer, the inspector starts his investigation. All the evidence suggests that the doctor did the deed, but we soon learn that nothing is quite what it seems…

When a wealthy patriarch falls ill on his 70th birthday, three of his sons rush in from Calcutta, leading to a reunion filled with painful ironies and lingering disillusionment. As the family—including an addled fourth son who lives with the old man—watches and waits, the static occasion brings out simmering tensions in their family dynamics, from the father’s moral rectitude to the business ambition of two sons and the withdrawal of their siblings.

A short commissioned piece on 'famous last words' set in WWII.

A Polish Resistance fighter who survived the Nazi years cannot accept the new Communist power.

Beginning in South Africa under the apartheid regime, the film follows a young girl who flees the country after a violent confrontation with a local white landowner in which her father is killed. She settles in Abidjan, where, ten years later, she has become a university student. As part of her studies, she visits the Taureg tribe on the edge of the Sahara before at last returning to post-Apartheid South Africa.

A well-off Indian family is paid an unexpected, and rather unwanted, visit by a man claiming to be the woman's long lost uncle. The initial suspicion with which they greet the man slowly dissolves as he regales them with stories of his travels, tales that are at odds with their conventional middle class perspective on the world.

A possible impostor torments a newly crowned medieval czar who may have ordered the real successor's death.

After leaving the asylum, Vincent van Gogh settles in the home of Doctor Gachet, where he keeps painting amidst the torments of his failing mental health. He begins an affair with his host’s daughter, however, she soon realizes that he doesn’t love her and that his heart beats only for art.

Two segments make up this short film. The first portion called “The French” has two men taste testing some delicious wine, and the other, titled “The Gauls”, is of men playing rugby. This short by Werner Herzog is part of the “The French as Seen By…” series. It was initiated and sponsored by the newspaper Le Figaro, as part of the 1988 celebration of the tenth anniversary of its magazine section.

Désiré is a fine servant and butler who regularly seduces the ladies of the house where he works, but then he moves on. This time he is working for Odette, the mistress of the minister of Posts and he is living a new situation. He has fallen in love with with Odette.

Satan tempts Father Dossignan, who is trying to save the soul of a young girl who killed one of her lovers.

Claude Goretta brings to life the age-old tale of Orpheus and Eurydice in a fresh adaptation of Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Monteverdi’s fabled opera Orfeo was long described as the first opera to have been written. Although modern scholarship has proven this to be untrue, the work remains one of the pillars of western music history, a musical creation which laid the foundations for much of what was to come. As musicologist Jack Westrup explains, Orfeo marked a major milestone not because it broke new ground, but because imagination had taken precedence over theory. While Monteverdi may not have been a revolutionary, his music represents the culmination of centuries of musical evolution, and shows him as the clear master of both polyphony and monody.

A look at the last few days of in the life of composer Frédéric Chopin's professional life.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the nun Maria is forced to flee her convent. She takes refuge in a brothel, until it is liberated by a woman's anarchist group. Maria joins the group and eventually goes to the front. The women's group faces the problems of fighting not only the nationalists, but also factions on the left seeking to impose a more traditional military structure.

A grizzled, hard-of-hearing cowboy, Slim, and his two friends, Dusty and Pete, capture a mysterious, well-dressed Frenchman.