Oei, later known as Katsushika Oi, was born the third daughter of Edo’s talented painter Katsushika Hokusai and his second wife Koto. Although Oei became the wife of a town painter for a time, her love of the paintbrush more than her husband spelt disaster and she comes back home to Hokusai from the family she had married into. This is how Oei starts to help her father out in his painting of the “insurmountable high wall”. Meanwhile, Oei can only talk to the painter Ikeda Zenjiro, who is her father’s student, about her pain and worries. Zenjiro has taken Edo by storm as Keisai Eisen, the master of ukiyo-e portraying beautiful women. He visits regularly because he admires Hokusai and secretly likes Oei although their relationship is like childhood friends. Oei respects her father whose paintings fascinated her and continues to work as a painter who supports him behind the scenes. When Hokusai’s masterpiece Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji was completed, she was also by his side.
The Countess (2009)
Kingdom of Hungary, 17th century. As she gets older, powerful Countess Erzsébet Báthory (1560-1614), blinded by the passion that she feels for a younger man, succumbs to the mad delusion that blood will keep her young and beautiful forever.
Ali (2001)
In 1964, a brash, new pro boxer, fresh from his Olympic gold medal victory, explodes onto the scene: Cassius Clay. Bold and outspoken, he cuts an entirely new image for African Americans in sport with his proud public self-confidence and his unapologetic belief that he is the greatest boxer of all time. Yet at the top of his game, both Ali's personal and professional lives face the ultimate test.
Fearless (2006)
After going through a series of tragic events in his life, martial arts master Huo Yuanjia returns to Tianjin and must fight four international soldiers, in order to safeguard his nation's pride.
Shine (1996)
Pianist David Helfgott, driven by his father and teachers, has a breakdown. Years later he returns to the piano, to popular if not critical acclaim.
Salute (2016)
A Pakistani school boy from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan sacrifices his life by preventing a suicide bomber from entering his school. This film is a tribute to Aitzaz Hasan.
Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh (2025)
A dramatization of the life story of C. Sankaran Nair, the lawyer who fought for the truth behind the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
Rosewater (2014)
In 2009, Iranian Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari was covering Iran's volatile elections for Newsweek. One of the few reporters living in the country with access to US media, he made an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in a taped interview with comedian Jason Jones. The interview was intended as satire, but if the Tehran authorities got the joke they didn't like it - and it would quickly came back to haunt Bahari when he was rousted from his family home and thrown into prison.
Mugabe (2023)
Mugabe rises from being a prisoner to power as a guerrilla fighter but gradually becomes the world's top tyrant. After four decades in power his allies do the unexpected.
Secrets of the Mona Lisa (2015)
This landmark film uses new evidence to investigate the truth behind Mona Lisa's identity and where she lived. It decodes centuries-old documents and uses state-of-the-art technology that could unlock the long-hidden truths of history's most iconic work of art.
Intolerance (2021)
A teenage girl's accidental death incites a media frenzy and causes her harsh father to turn his rage against those he believes are responsible.
The Enlightener (2010)
Returning from Mecca, Darwis changes his name to Ahmad Dahlan as he is disturbed by the trend of Islamic laws in his society; that borders on heresy, Syrik (polytheism), and Bid’ah (wrong innovation). Using a compass, he proves that the direction of Qibla (that points to Mecca), in the Great Mosque of Kauman is wrong. The discovery angers every Kyai (Islamic experts), especially the head of the Great Mosque of Kauman, Kyai Penghulu Cholil Kamaludiningrat. Dahlan, who studied in Mecca for five years, is seen as a rebel upstart. Since the proposal of changing the direction of Qibla is rejected, Dahlan starts a movement calling for the change. On his first sermon as a preacher, Dahlan criticizes the habits of residents in his village in Yogyakarta: "In a prayer, only a sincere and patient heart is needed, it requires no Kyais, money, let alone offerings". As a result, Dahlan gets a hostile reception.
Rudolf Nureyev: Dance to Freedom (2015)
Dance, espionage and passion come together in this powerful and exciting docudrama that tells the extraordinary story of how Soviet ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev defected to the West in 1961 and became a living legend.
Bombshell (2019)
Bombshell is a revealing look inside the most powerful and controversial media empire of all time; and the explosive story of the women who brought down the infamous man who created it.
Before the Night (2018)
The life and times of Pippo Fava, a Sicilian journalist who fought the Mafia through his local newspaper in the '70s and early '80s, meeting an untimely end.
Notes on Blindness (2016)
After losing sight in 1983, John Hull began keeping an audio diary, a unique testimony of loss, rebirth and renewal, excavating the interior world of blindness. Following on from the Emmy Award-winning short film of the same name, Notes on Blindness is an ambitious and groundbreaking work, both affecting and innovative.
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (1981)
Biography of the former first lady, focusing on her years as a photojournalist and leading up to her marriage to John F. Kennedy and their moving into the White House.
Sal (2013)
James Franco's Sal chronicles the final hours of the life of actor Sal Mineo, one-time teen idol and star of the blockbuster films Rebel Without a Cause and Exodus.
Bettie Page Reveals All (2013)
The world's greatest pin-up model and cult icon, Bettie Page, recounts the true story of how her free expression overcame government witch-hunts to help launch America's sexual revolution. When she saw the film The Notorious Bettie Page, produced by HBO in 2006, the main person concerned reacted unequivocally: “Lies! Lies!” In a long interview recorded shortly before her death, the woman who entered the collective unconscious as the ultimate pin-up gave her version of events to director Mark Mori. In a gravelly voice, Bettie Page tells her own story and lifts the veil on areas often hidden by images that have made so many men and women fantasize since the 1950s: her abused childhood, an eclipse that lasted forty years, her mental illness. Through testimonies and unpublished archives, this documentary brings back to life a body and a face endlessly declined before our eyes, just as Bettie wanted: “I would like people to remember me as I was in the photos.”