The Italian adventurer and libertine Giovanni Jacopo Casanova lived from 1725 to 1798, but in this six-part series Dennis Potter attempted to find a contemporary relevance through his central themes of sex and religion. He commented that Casanova "was concerned with religious and sexual freedom, and these are the things we have to address ourselves to now." Casanova was imprisoned in Venice in 1755, and Potter used that event as a central device, constantly inter-cutting to contrast Casanova's a find out more...

'The Round Up' takes place within a detention camp in the remote Hungarian countryside, after the collapse of the 1848 revolution against Austrian domination. A formal variation on the main patterns of ritual power, director Jansco deliberately side-steps revolutionary heroics and focuses on the persecutions and de-humanizations, which always accompany conflict, and makes 'an almost abstract statement of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed'... there are only losers and survivors. find out more...