Juan Diego Botto
The Story of Film: An Odyssey is a documentary series about the history of film, presented on television in 15 one-hour chapters with a total length of over 900 minutes. It was directed and narrated by Mark Cousins, a film critic from Northern Ireland, based on his 2004 book The Story of Film.
The series was broadcast in September 2011 on More4, the digital television service of UK broadcaster Channel 4. The Story of Film was also featured in its entirety at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival, and it was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in February 2012. It was broadcast in the United States on Turner Classic Movies beginning in September 2013.
The Telegraph headlined the series’ initial broadcast in September 2011 as the “cinematic event of the year”, describing it as “visually ensnaring and intellectually lithe, it’s at once a love letter to cinema, an unmissable masterclass, and a radical rewriting of movie history.” An Irish Times writer called the program a “landmark”.
In February 2012, A. O. Scott of The New York Times contrasted the project with its “important precursor”, Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire du cinéma. In contrast to the Godard project, which Scott called “personal, polemical and sometimes cryptic”, Scott described Cousins’ film as “a semester-long film studies survey course compressed into 15 brisk, sometimes contentious hours” that “stands as an invigorated compendium of conventional wisdom.” He also commended its “refusal to be nostalgic”.
When flaky novelist Mario turns up one day at the school where Daniel teaches, the educator is convinced the writer is a spirit from his repressed past, buried deep in his subconscious. As children, the two might almost have been brothers. But the marriage between Daniel’s father and Mario’s mother never materialised. This unexpected re-encounter brings both families together. When Mario slits his wrists and dies, Daniel and his wife Laura provide a home for the dead man’s daughter. Laura, who is childless, loves the girl from the moment they meet, but Daniel feels increasingly nervous around her. The demons of his past guilt continue to torment him. Daniel suffers agonies – until things come to a head during a show down in the mountains.
The true-life, stranger-than-fiction tale of eighteenth-century Greek pirate turned merchant Ioannis Varvakis, who rose from humble beginnings to become the head of one of the largest mercantile empires in Europe.
Letty Dobesh is a thief and con artist fresh out of prison whose life is always one wrong turn and bad decision from implosions — just how she likes it. But when she overhears a hitman being hired to kill a man’s wife, she sets out to derail the job, launching her on a collision course with the killer, entangling them in a dangerous and seductive relationship.
Javier Falcón, Chief of the Sevilla Homicide Division, must solve two different cases in a short time. In the first case he is personally involved. An old friend of his infiltrated an Islamic terrorist cell and now the group is trying to recruit his young son for their cause. The same case hits even closer at home. A war is raging between two clans in the Russian Mafia. When an important mobster tries to defect, he gets killed in a car crash. On the scene, the police find an encrypted USB stick with highly explosive information. Then the son of Falcon’s girlfriend Consuelo is kidnapped. They are contacted by both Mafia clans claiming they have the kid and wanting to get their hands on the information. And both say they will kill him if Falcon doesn’t give them the stick
