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Merchant Ivory Productions
location_onNew York City, New YorkpublicUS
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The City of Your Final Destination 2009    star_border 5.7
28-year-old Kansas University doctoral student Omar Razaghi wins a grant to write a biography of Latin American writer Jules Gund. Omar must get through to three people who were close to Gund – his brother, widow, and younger mistress – so he can get authorization to write the biography.
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Before the Rains 2007    star_border 4.9
Set in southern India in the late 1930s, this provocative tale traces the story of three people caught in an inexorable web of forbidden romance and dangerous secrets. After a British spice planter falls in love with his alluring servant, an idealistic young man finds himself torn between his ambitions and his family, his village and his past.
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A Tribute To Ismail Merchant 2005    star_border 10
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The White Countess 2005    star_border 6.3
In 1930s Shanghai, 'The White Countess' is both Sofia—a fallen member of the Russian aristocracy—and a nightclub created by a blind American diplomat, who asks Sofia to be the centerpiece of the world he wants to create.
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Heights 2005    star_border 6.6
Spanning twenty-four hours, HEIGHTS follows five New Yorkers challenged to choose their destiny before the sun comes up the next day.
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Le Divorce 2003    star_border 5
While visiting her sister in Paris, a young woman finds romance and learns her brother-in-law is a philanderer.
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Book of Kings 2002    star_border 7
A short film by Chris Terrio.
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The Mystic Masseur 2001    star_border 5.1
Circa 1940 in Trinidad, still a British Colony, lives Ganesh Ramseyor, of East Indian origin, along with his wife, Leela. He longs to reach out to people, especially to Hindus, in order to promote the Hindu Faith, and be known as a writer. He does get considerable success, so much so that he becomes famous as a miracle worker, having cured a man of sharing intimacy with his bicycle; prevented a man from believing that he can fly; and convincing a young woman to end her fast. His fame spreads all over the island and thousands throng to seek his blessings, which he does dole out quite benevolently, without charging any fees from the poor and the needy. He then decides to spread his wings by challenging the local politician Pandit Narayan Chandrashekhar alias Cyrus T., and takes over The Hindu Organization, thence opening his way to a seat in the prestigious Member of the Legislative Assembly
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The Golden Bowl 2000    star_border 6
Adam Verver, a US billionaire in London, dotes on daughter Maggie. An impecunious Italian, Prince Amerigo, marries her even though her best friend, Charlotte Stant, is his lover. She and Amerigo keep this secret from Maggie, so Maggie interests her widowed father in Charlotte, who is happy with the match because she wants to be close to Amerigo. Charlotte desires him, the lovers risk discovery, Amerigo longs for Italy, Maggie wants to spare her father's pain, and Adam wants to return to America to build a museum. Amidst lies and artifice, what fate awaits adulterers?
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Cotton Mary 1999    star_border 4.7
A British family is trapped between culture, tradition, and the colonial sins of the past.
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A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries 1998    star_border 6
This fictionalized story, based on the family life of writer James Jones, is an emotional slice-of-life story. Jones is portrayed here as Bill Willis, a former war hero turned author who combats alcoholism and is starting to experience health problems. Living in France with his wife, daughter, and an adopted son, the family travels an unconventional road which casts them as outsiders to others. Preaching a sexual freedom, his daughter's sexual discovery begins at an early age and betrays her when the family moves to Hanover in America. Her overt sexuality clashes with the values of her teenage American peers and gives her a problematic reputation. Meanwhile, her brooding brother copes with his own interior pain regarding his past, only comfortable communicating within the domestic space.
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Side Streets 1998    star_border 7
The lives of diverse characters in each of New York City's five boroughs overlap.
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The Proprietor 1996
An expatriated French novelist returns to Paris when she learns that her childhood home is being placed on the auction block.
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Surviving Picasso 1996    star_border 5.8
The passionate Merchant-Ivory drama tells the story of Francoise Gilot, the only lover of Pablo Picasso who was strong enough to withstand his ferocious cruelty and move on with her life.
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Feast of July 1995    star_border 5.9
After an abandoned young woman in late 19th Century England is taken in by a rural couple with three handsome sons, tragic consequences result.
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Jefferson in Paris 1995    star_border 5.2
His wife having recently died, Thomas Jefferson accepts the post of United States ambassador to pre-revolutionary France, though he finds it difficult to adjust to life in a country where the aristocracy subjugates an increasingly restless peasantry. In Paris, he becomes smitten with cultured artist Maria Cosway, but, when his daughter visits from Virginia accompanied by her attractive slave, Sally Hemings, Jefferson's attentions are diverted.
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In Custody 1994    star_border 4.8
Ismail Merchant's feature directorial debut addresses a subject close to his heart: the expressive Urdu language of Northern India, in danger of extinction as political trends and modernization obscure its contributions to Indian culture. Merchant 's treatment is wry and good humored , as his characters - an aging Urdu poet (Shashi Kapoor) and a worshipful young college lecturer - clash despite their shared passion for the beauty of words.
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The Remains of the Day 1993    star_border 7.4
A rule-bound head butler's world of manners and decorum in the household he maintains is tested by the arrival of a housekeeper who falls in love with him in post-WWI Britain. The possibility of romance and his master's cultivation of ties with the Nazi cause challenge his carefully maintained veneer of servitude.
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Howards End 1992    star_border 7
A saga of class relations and changing times in an Edwardian England on the brink of modernity, the film centers on liberal Margaret Schlegel, who, along with her sister Helen, becomes involved with two couples: wealthy, conservative industrialist Henry Wilcox and his wife Ruth, and the downwardly mobile working-class Leonard Bast and his mistress Jackie.
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The Ballad of the Sad Cafe 1991    star_border 5.7
A small-town eccentric opens a café in her decaying home.
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