Filmin's catalogue has plenty of good films connected to art. If we focus on biographies, there are loads of titles waiting for us, so in this post we've made a selection, although you can also go to this list we've put together and see all the biopics we've saved. Here come the first 5 recommendations, we hope you enjoy them!
Egon Schiele
Based on Hilde Berger's novel and directed by Dieter Berner, the film portrays the controversial life of the Austrian painter, one of Austria's most important artists of the last century. Played by Noah Saavedra, he blends right into the provocative young man who scandalised Austria during his short life in the early 20th century. A pupil of Klimt and one of the leading figures of Austrian Expressionism, he was always surrounded by controversy for his erotic paintings, and even ended up in prison when they were deemed pornographic. A film worth watching about the man behind La muerte y la doncella, perhaps the most representative artwork of a prolific career of over 300 paintings and almost 3000 drawings.
Edvard Munch
An adaptation of the private diaries of the eccentric Norwegian painter, it tells the start of Munch's formative years in late 19th century Oslo and his romance with Mrs Heiberg, a hugely successful actress at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. A relationship the artist himself described in his diaries as vampiric in nature (hence the red-haired woman and the tormented man in so many of his paintings), it left the famous author of El Grito with a trauma that would mark his tormented existence for ever. Mercilessly attacked by critics and public alike in his home country, he finds a new home in Berlin where, together with other artists of his time, he becomes a hugely important part of the new cultural winds blowing through the Europe of the second industrial revolution. Considered one of the best biopics about painters ever made, this remastered edition, with clearly expressionist editing, is held up as one of the great masterpieces by geniuses such as the legendary Bergman. A feature film with amateur actors, directed by the English filmmaker and forerunner of the mockumentary Peter Watkins, it is a deeply personal approach to the life and work of Edvard Munch.
Afterimage
The posthumous work of the leading figure of Polish cinema Andrzej Wajda, about the famous avant-garde artist Wladyslaw Strzeminski. The artist, originally from Minsk (Belarus), took part in the First World War, where he was seriously wounded and had an arm and a leg amputated, none of which stopped him from developing his art. Later, under the Nazi occupation, many of his artworks were destroyed while he was a teacher at the National School of Fine Arts in Łódź (which he also founded), as they were considered "degenerate art". What stood out later, above all, was his struggle against Stalin's oppression at the time the People's Republic of Poland was constituted in 1946. Cast out for refusing to follow the anachronistic doctrine of socialist realism, hounded and expelled from the university, his traces erased from the museums, he takes up a fight against the Party alongside several of his students. Although he died in utter poverty in 1952, his struggle became a symbol of resistance against the intellectual tyranny of the dictatorship.
The film's director, awarded an honorary Oscar in 2000 and the author of memorable works such as The Promised Land, Man of Iron and Katyn, uses his last work as an exercise on artistic freedom and a criticism of totalitarian regimes. Available on the Spanish platform in the original version with subtitles and dubbed.
Camille Claudel 1915
A masterful performance from the legendary Juliette Binoche, for many the best role of her career. Directed by Bruno Dumont, an award winner in Cannes, London and Toronto, she plays the last days in the life of the sculptor Camille Claudel, Rodin's lover and the sister of the writer Paul Claudel. Committed to an asylum on her own family's orders, the film reflects her obsession and persecution mania regarding her lover Auguste Rodin, with whom she had a pupil-master relationship and whom she inspired in many of the artworks of the French sculptor behind el Beso and the extremely well known El pensador. The film, in which Binoche acts in the psychiatric hospital alongside patients with real mental illnesses, portrays the sculptor's final days as she waits for her brother's visit and slowly wastes away in her torment. A very harsh film, for lovers of dramatic cinema, about the tragic existence of the French artist.
Maudie
Based on real events, the story tells the life of the Canadian painter Maud Lewis (Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water) when she meets the man who would become the love of her life, Everett Lewis (Ethan Hawke, Boyhood), the surly fisherman she started working for as a young woman, hoping to get away from her protective family in a small town in Nova Scotia. Later, once she had settled in the fishing village of Marshalltown with Everett, who within a short time would become her husband, she began her artistic career selling Christmas cards she painted by hand herself. In time, her simple paintings reached the whole country and made her one of the most recognised Canadian folk artists of all time. Working mostly with landscapes, Maud always used bright colours, never mixed, to bring back in her paintings her childhood memories of very recognisable parts of the Gulf of Maine, natural settings taken into the film that give it very recognisable photography, even though it includes areas such as Newfoundland, where the artist never lived. Directed by the Irish filmmaker Aisling Walsh and premiered in 2016 at the Toronto International Film Festival, it reflects above all the love story of the two protagonists, from the difficult beginnings due to their basic differences to the closeness and the display of that love by Maud and Everett.
You can also see what content we've gathered from other platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. There's also a second part on Filmin, we couldn't pick just 5. Have you seen any of them?
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