Roger Deutsch
Hour by hour the ancient face of repeated / Beings changes, and hour by hour, / Thinking, we get older. / Everything passes, unknown, and the knower / Who remains knows he knows not. / But nothing, Aware or unaware, returns. / Equals, therefore, of what isn’t our equal, / Let us preserve, in the heat we remember, / The flame of the spent hour. Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa)
Chronicling the history of his family from 1787 to now while looking for the answers to some buried secrets regarding certain relatives, Roger Deutsch (The Boy on the Train) soothingly voices over his latest effort - a poetic, travelogue-esque 30-minute documentary which takes the viewer on an engaging personal journey from Hungary to America and back via beautiful vintage photographs, grainy home videos (that often look better than professional and persistently stand the test of time), as well as his own impressionistic footage, with the unique experience enhanced by excellent musical choices. —Nikola Gocic
1990, after the fall. A man struggles to survive in the forest, living alone in a small cabin. One day he spots a mysterious child in an abandoned summer camp.
An American film director screening his new film in Budapest meets one of the subjects of that film. What begins as a simple chat over coffee turns into an alternately comic and suspenseful road trip.
We all live on the same planet, under one sun which nurtures and renews our unique and common hopes for the future. No matter how much we differ from each other in color, ethnicity and belief, we all share the same source of life, united in our destinies. An omnibus film on the topic of Turkish - Armenian relations.
An old fashioned suite which takes the viewer via car, boat, plane and train to an unexpected destination.
A structuralist film about narrative structure, "Intermezzo" compresses five cinematic melodramas by compiling parallel fragments through a polyphonic over-lapping of time-frames, to foreground the meta-narrative behind the genre, yet remains a melodrama at heart. The motion pictures used are (in order of appearance) Gregory Ratoff: Intermezzo (1939), Douglas Sirk: Interlude (1957), John M. Stahl: When Tomorrow Comes (1939), David Lean: Summertime (1955) and Gustav Molander: Intermezzo (1936).
A memoir of early adolescence constructed from an instructional video originally produced in 1959.
Filmed in 1974 and edited and released in 1983 (and then rereleased by its director in 2005), DEAD PEOPLE purports to document the final years of Frank Butler, a local fixture in the depressed burg of Ellicot City with a particular fondness for drink and tales of the dead. Over hazy 16mm footage two decades later, Deutsch adopted a painfully unsentimental view of his early approach, colored as it was by notions of ethnographic film and an undercurrent of fetishism for a man he considered somehow more "alive" than himself. While it chafes against notions of authenticity in documentary and incisively hints at the complicity of the subject in inventing his own history, DEAD PEOPLE simultaneously oozes nostalgia, transcending its own judgment as a gauzy memorial for the man Deutsch once called a friend.
Mario, a "developmentally disabled" man learns how to use a movie camera.
Back in late 1963, a Belgian nun known only as Soeur Sourire, or Sister Smile, topped America's pop music charts with the relentlessly cheerful tune "Dominique," from an album of 12 songs that sold 1.5 million copies. From the little that is known of the ill-fated nun's life, Italy-based American writer-director Roger Deutsch has made the boldly speculative yet persuasive Italian-language film "Suor Sorriso" in which the nun (Ginevra Colonna) emerges as a tormented, unstable woman who abruptly left the convent after her recording triumph before taking her final vows. Running a shelter for wayward girls, she and another ex-nun (Simona Caparrini) enter a passionate, tumultuous and destructive affair. Colonna's volcanic Deckers craves spiritual redemption as well as the other woman's love but is so beset by demons that she embarks on a flamboyant, drug-fueled downward spiral that ultimately engulfs her lover as well as herself.
A teenager discovers that a military project involving a surveillance helicopter that uses artificial intelligence is being housed at a neighborhood hangar, but that the device is developing a mind of its own.
Shot in NYC in 1984 and commissioned as a portrait of the Dutch expatriate artist Anton van Dalen, The View From Avenue A is also and more interestingly and profoundly, a portrait of another disappearing place, in this case, the dying (or revivifying, depending on your point of view) lower east side of Nest York. Deutsch brilliantly charts a history of a lost place, here not just a physical land- scape, but a landscape of the mind, that is, the artistic "bohemia" of the 60's and 70'e, changing soon to be completely gone, crushed, inexorably, by history." —Steven Simmons
JEWS excavates a lost world of manners and ritual in home movies shot by several Chicago families from the 1920s through the 1940s. Much as in similar found footage soliloquies by Péter Forgács, Jay Rosenblatt and Ken Jacobs, director Roger Deutsch wrings unexpected pathos from mundane traces of the past. Children mug for the camera with dances of the day, upright mothers march their strollers up the avenue, men smoke, the family gathers around the table to light the candles. The bare title cannot help but raise the specter of contemporaneous events in Europe, lending an extra degree of urgency to the film's meditation on disappearance. - Max Goldberg
Nada, a beautiful French journalist on assignment in New York, records the life and work of an up and coming punk rock star, Billy. Soon she enters into a volatile relationship with him and must decide whether to continue with it, or return to her lover, a fellow journalist trying to track down the elusive Andy Warhol.
In 1835 a French writer attempts the ascent of Mount Etna with a group of men, two mules, and a bottle of rum. Crossing the three areas of the volcano – the lower region, the fire region, and the desert region – they discover the enigmatic traces of unknown myths. New powerful eyes question the volcano, observe its every movement, and yearn to penetrate its secrets, and are faced with the most remote layers of matter and the depths of the technological gaze.
