Roger Deutsch

Roger Deutsch

N/A

Filmmaker based in Budapest, Hungary.

Most Known for...

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Sister Smile 2001 (0.8)

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.
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Dead People 1983

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.
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The Flame of the Spent Hour 2020

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)