Hugo Pratt

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Elegant, daring, generous, Corto Maltese travels around the world wherever his current whim tales him. In every exotic locale his code of honor leads him to battle on behalf of the poor and the weak, battles he win due to his sparkling wit and daring.

Two aging crooks are given two weeks to repay a debt to a woman named The American. They recruit their recently deceased partner's son to help them break into a laboratory and steal the vaccine against STBO, a sexually transmitted disease that is sweeping the country. It's spread by having sex without emotional involvement, and most of its victims are teenagers who make love out of curiosity rather than commitment.

When Hugo Pratt passed away in 1995, he was holding an Ethiopian cross in his left hand. In order to understand his enduring love of the black continent, Hugo Pratt’s companion, Jean Claude Guilbert, together with a group of like-minded people, searches for traces of him in the Horn of Africa. Thanks to their efforts and invaluable audiovisual archive material, a new picture of this remarkable artist and his attitude towards Africa begins to emerge.

The title 'The desire to be useless' recalls a famous Hugo Pratt's expression and contains a double meaning. On one hand, it representes the comic's claim as an art form, long considered marginal but elevated, but by Pratt was considered a language with high literary and artistic value. On the other, it expresses a life philosophy founded on freedom, on the rejection of reducing existence to fiction or to commodity, and on the possibility of the adventure and the unexpected. Containing interviews with Patrizia Zanotti, Dominique Petitfaux, Thierry Thomas e Marco Steiner, the documentary completes a cinematic research lasted twenty years, returning Hugo Pratt as one of the most important auhor of illustrated literature and an artist still capable of being received by the contemporary audience.

At the end of 1918 while civil war is raging on in Russia, antagonism is slowly spreading to the East, between the Oral mountains and Shanghai. Stuck between a desire to save what's left of the great Imperial Russia, and starting from a clean slate, old generals, secret organizations, and mercenaries attracted by gold, struggle to take advantage of the events. As Corto Maltese returns to Shanghai, he barely gets time to cross paths with his old friend/nemesis Rasputin, and escape a murder attempt before being contacted by members of a Chinese secret organization called "The Red Lanterns". In the heart of violent Manchurian horizons, Corto and Rasputin launch themselves into a fabulous treasure hunt, following the tracks of the mysterious armor-plated train of Kolchak. A steel monster spiked with canons and machine guns, this trains protects the counter-revolutionaries gold...

In 1916, laconic adventurer Corto Maltese is in Paramaribo, Surinam visiting his mystic female friend Java. He helps a young heir haunted by voodoo spirits, delivers some weapons to rebels in Brazil and hunts for treasure with Rasputin.

In 1913, laconic sea captain Corto Maltese, adrift in the Pacific, gets rescued by his bandit friend Rasputin who's taking two rich shipwrecked teens to an island where his boss the Monk will hold them for ransom. WWI complicates things.

Several key words emerge from Hugo Pratt's work, inseparable from his life: travel, adventure, erudition, esotericism, mystery, poetry, melancholy... and of course, Corto Maltese, his hero and alter ego, who established him as one of the greatest names in comic books. Born in Italy in 1927 and dying in Switzerland sixty-eight years later, Hugo Pratt, born without an H and with only one T, grew up in the shadow of a fascist father who took him at a very young age to Ethiopia, which was occupied by Mussolini's forces. The teenager developed a fascination for the wide-open spaces of Africa, soon followed by an irresistible attraction to the Indian world. This was the starting point for a life of travel, success, conquests, rare failures, and marked by his veneration for the American cartoonist Milton Caniff, his absolute master.

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Compilation of three stories about laconic adventurer Corto Maltese set in 1918. He infiltrates a fort where young prince Saud is being held, tries to stop a war between two African tribes and investigate the secretive "Leopard-Men".

Right after she moves in with him, Frederico's new girlfriend Francesca sends him back to her former boyfriend's apartment to fetch her something she forgot - but he's surprised to find him lying there - dead. Assuming that Francesca killed him and sent him for cleaning up, he cuts him up in pieces, puts him in a suitcase and tries to get rid of it... but he has a hard time finding a suitably quiet place. Unfortunately there's a witness, who comes back on him. One thing leads to another, and the normally shy and overly fearful Frederico has to rid himself of more and more corpses until this black comedy ends.

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Hugo Pratt's famous comics adventurer, Corto Maltese while sojourning in Adana, Turkey, discovers a map to the treasure of Cyrus, an ancient king of Persia. To assist him in his quest, he enlists his old friend/nemesis the unbelievable Raspoutine whom he first has to help escape from the prison of Samarkand (aka "La maison dorée de Samarkand", the golden house of Samarkand). On the long and tortured way to the riches, he encounters all kind of interesting characters, soldiers of fortune, lost British actors, and even his doppelgänger.

Richard Butler is the director of a Montreal advertising agency. When he meets Dyanne, a young beautiful model, he falls in love.

Canada, 1911. Narrated by a vulture, the story of Jesuit Joe, a mixed-race who belongs to a rebel Indian family, which have pay a lot for the defense of their territory. After having striped a policeman of his uniform, Jesuit Joe cross the Far North to give justice.