Documentary filmmaker Bruno Wollheim screens and discusses his new film, David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, at Bates at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 28, in Room 105 of the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

The event is open to the public at no cost and refreshments will be served.

Filmed over three years and premiered this year on the BBC, this documentary captures Hockney’s return from California to paint the Yorkshire landscape of his childhood. One of the most influential British artists of his time, Hockney is depicted as he re-invents his painting from scratch, working through the seasons and in all weathers out in the countryside — and makes the largest picture ever painted outdoors. The film is at once the story of a homecoming and a revealing portrait of what inspires and motivates one of the greatest living artists as time runs out.

The film won “Best Essay” at the 2010 International Festival for Films on Art in Montreal.

Read Wollheim on the making of the film.

Friday, Oct. 24, is a red-letter night at Bates College for film fans, thanks to visits by two respected directors. The public is invited to attend both events free of charge.

Argentinean filmmaker Leandro Katz shows his film El Día Que Me Quieras (“The Day You’ll Love Me”), a deconstruction of the infamous photographs taken of the slain revolutionary Ché Guevara, at 7 p.m. Oct. 24 in Room 105 of the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

A discussion with Katz follows the film. For more information, call the film’s sponsor, the Bates College Multicultural Center, at 207-786-8215.

An hour later, István Szabó, Academy Award-winning director of the 1981 film Mephisto, gives a lecture titled “Close-up: The Art of Film” in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, Andrews Road.

Szabó, Hungary’s best-known director, won the 1981 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film for Mephisto, the story of an actor in pre-war Germany whose ambition proves to be his downfall. (The director’s full name is pronounced “eesht-vahn saw-boh.”) The film is the subject of a first-year seminar this fall at Bates. His lecture is sponsored by the Mellon Program in the Humanities at Bates. For more information, call 207-786-6378.

Szabó, like his late Polish counterpart Krzysztof Kieslowski, is one of the few directors from the former Soviet bloc to win international acclaim, explains Katalin Vecsey, a lecturer in the theater and rhetoric department who invited Szabó to Bates.

“He’s a director from a small country with a strange language who’s been able to step over those barriers and make movies for a worldwide audience,” she says.

Szabó has demonstrated a distinctive grasp of themes central to the human condition, Vecsey says, pointing to 1999′s Sunshine. Starring Ralph Fiennes and set in Hungary, the film explores the impact of anti-Semitism on successive generations of one family through three momentous periods of history — the eras of Habsburg, Nazi and Communist domination.

Born in 1938 in Budapest (also Vecsey’s home town), Szabó became a leading figure in the new wave of Hungarian film following the 1964 release of his first feature film, The Age of Daydreaming. He has won a variety of international awards for his work and has taught film history in London, Berlin and elsewhere. His Bates visit comes during editing in Toronto for his next film, Being Julia, with Annette Bening and Jeremy Irons.

First-year seminars at Bates are designed to introduce the basics of academic writing, research and critical thought. Mephisto: Film, Novel, Screenplay starts with Klaus Mann’s 1936 novel, loosely based on the career of his brother-in-law. In preparation for the course, Vecsey and the theater department commissioned the first English translation of the Mephisto screenplay, originally written in Hungarian and filmed in German.

The story, says Vecsey, has “a universal message about how far people will go to be successful in their fields. It’s important to see this theme happening nowadays — if you think of network television with all the reality shows, everybody wants to be famous. People will eat anything just to be on television.”

El Día Que Me Quieras, a non-narrative film investigating death and the power of photography, is a meditation on the last pictures taken of Ernesto Ché Guevara, taken, as he lay dead on a table surrounded by his captors, in Bolivia in 1967. Not a political documentary in the traditional sense, the film alternates between evocation and straight reportage, centering on an interview with the Bolivian photographer Freddy Alborta, who made the famous image. Suffused with a sense of mystery, the film is about our assimilation of history.

The film had its world premiere at the Festival del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano de La Habana, where it won the International Jury’s Coral Prize. It has also won the Best Documentary prize in the Festival Internacional de Cine de Valdivia, Chile. The film has been featured at festivals in Holland, Italy, Spain, Norway, Germany, France and the United States. It was part of the Visible Evidence Conference at San Francisco State University and also the New Documentaries Series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.