Documentary that follows the lives of several Jewish refugees who fled to Shanghai during WWII.
Social & External
Annie Witting (voice)
Adolf Stopfer (voice)
To cool the heat on the asylum debate - the biggest 'hot potato' in Australian politics, we took a hot potato food van around the country in the lead up to the 2013 Federal Election. The mission? To see what Australia really thinks asylum seekers. This is an account of this journey.
Dublin, June 2024: thousands of men seeking asylum in Ireland are homeless. Olivia and her group of volunteers are trying to find safe locations where the men can sleep each night, but the government is actively enforcing its new policy against homeless encampments, and the far-right are lurking.
Lithuania, 1941, during World War II. Hundreds of thousands of texts on Jewish culture, stolen by the Germans, are gathered in Vilnius to be classified, either to be stored or to be destroyed. A group of Jewish scholars and writers, commissioned by the invaders to carry out the sorting operations, but reluctant to collaborate and determined to save their legacy, hide many books in the ghetto where they are confined. This is the epic story of the Paper Brigade.
Documentarians Justine Shapiro and B.Z. Goldberg traveled to Israel to interview Palestinian and Israeli kids ages 11 to 13, assembling their views on living in a society afflicted with violence, separatism and religious and political extremism. This 2002 Oscar nominee for Best Feature Documentary culminates in an astonishing day in which two Israeli children meet Palestinian youngsters at a refugee camp.
Moving to Mars charts the epic journey made by two Burmese families from a vast refugee camp on the Thai/Burma border to their new homes in the UK. At times hilarious, at times emotional, their travels provide a fascinating and unique insight not only into the effects of migration, but also into one of the most important current political crises - Burma.
In search of the lucrative matsutake mushroom, two former soldiers discover the means to gradually heal their wounds of war. Roger, a self-described 'fall-down drunk' and sniper in Vietnam, and Kouy, a Cambodian refugee who fought the Khmer Rouge, bonded in the bustling tent-city known as Mushroom Camp, which pops up each autumn in the Oregon woods. Their friendship became an adoptive family; according to a Cambodian custom, if you lose your family like Kouy, you must rebuilt it anew. Now, however, this new family could be lost. Roger's health is declining and trauma flashbacks rack his mind; Kouy gently aids his family before the snow falls and the hunting season ends, signaling his time to leave.
Marcel Ophuls' riveting film details the heinous legacy of the Gestapo head dubbed "The Butcher of Lyon." Responsible for over 4,000 deaths in occupied France during World War II, Barbie would escape—with U.S. help—to South America in 1951, where he lived until a global manhunt led to his 1983 arrest and subsequent trial.
In 1994, the Zapatista National Liberation Army, made up of impoverished Mayan Indians from the state of Chiapas, took over five towns and 500 ranches in southern Mexico. The government deployed its troops and at least 145 people died in the ensuing battle. Filmmaker Nettie Wild travelled to the country's jungle canyons to film the elusive and fragile life of this uprising.
Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years on this sprawling documentary about the Holocaust, conducting his own interviews and refusing to use a single frame of archival footage. Dividing Holocaust witnesses into three categories – survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators – Lanzmann presents testimonies from survivors of the Chelmno concentration camp, an Auschwitz escapee, and witnesses of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as well as a chilling report of gas chambers from an SS officer at Treblinka.
Filmmaker Peter Hegedus embarks on the challenging journey to make Sorella's Story, an immersive 360° film set on the beaches of Latvia in December 1941, when thousands of Jewish Women and children perished at the hands of Nazi collaborators. Along the way Peter teams up with Jewish-Australian 90-year-old Ethel Davies whose family was also killed in the same massacre.
Whitwell, TN is a small, rural community of less than two thousand people nestled in the mountains of Tennessee. Its citizens are almost exclusively white and Christian. In 1998, the children of Whitwell Middle School took on an inspiring project, launched out of their principal's desire to help her students open their eyes to diversity in the world and the horrors and enormity of the holocaust.
An account of the life and work of the Polish writer Stanisław Lem (1921-2006), a key figure in science fiction literature involved in mysteries and paradoxes that need to be enlightened.
Former inmates and American soldiers remember the cruel conditions in Buchenwald concentration camp.
The Perfect Story offers a riveting, intimate look at the ethical and moral challenges sparked by the relationship between a foreign correspondent and a young Somali refugee. By revealing the boundaries of journalism and filmmaking, the film questions what stories are told, why, and who gets to tell them.
Documentary brings the time of the Holocaust to life and provides insight into the mind of the organizer of this crime: Adolf Eichmann. The documentary contrasts Eichmann's statements and memories - documented in the original soundtrack - directly with those of Holocaust survivors. The picture of the person and the crime is rounded off by the many contemporary witnesses who were involved either in Eichmann's arrest or the subsequent trial - such as the doctors and psychologists who looked after him, the guards and police officers through to the interrogator, the public prosecutor and the judge at the trial.
September 1st, 1939. Nazi Germany invades Poland. The campaign is fast, cruel and ruthless. In these circumstances, how is it that ordinary German soldiers suddenly became vicious killers, terrorizing the local population? Did everyone turn into something worse than wild animals? The true story of the first World War II offensive that marks in the history of infamy the beginning of a carnage and a historical tragedy.
What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)
A documentary exploring how Albanians, including many Muslims, helped and sheltered Jewish refugees during WWII at their own risk, and trying to help the son of an Albanian baker that housed a Jewish family for a year return some Hebrew books that the family had to leave behind.
A pig farm in Lety, South Bohemia would make an ideal monument to collaboration and indifference, says writer and journalist Markus Pape. Most of those appearing in this documentary filmed in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, France, Germany and Croatia have personal experience of the indifference to the genocide of the Roma. Many of them experienced the Holocaust as children, and their distorted memories have earned them distrust and ridicule. Continuing racism and anti-Roma sentiment is illustrated among other matters by how contemporary society looks after the locations where the murders occurred. However, this documentary film essay focuses mainly on the survivors, who share with viewers their indelible traumas, their "hole in the head".
SHANGHAI GHETTO recalls the strange-but-true story of thousands of European Jews who were shut out of country after country while trying to escape Nazi persecution in the late 1930s. Left without options or entrance visas, a beacon of hope materialized for them on the other side of the world, and in the unlikeliest of places, Japanese-controlled Shanghai. Fleeing for their lives, these Jewish refugees journeyed to form a settlement in the exotic city, penniless and unprepared for their new life in the Far East. At the turn of the new millennium, filmmakers Dana Janklowicz-Mann and Amire Mann boldly snuck into China with two survivors and a digital camera to shoot at the site of the original Shanghai Ghetto, unchanged since WWII.
Ruth Butler, a clerk in an emporium, marries Jimmy Rutledge and thereby greatly displeases his mother, the owner of the emporium, because of Ruth's lowly origins. Renaud Graham, one of Mrs. Rutledge's friends, becomes interested in Ruth, forces his way into her apartment, and attempts to make violent love to her. Jimmy walks in on their embrace and, suspecting the worst, leaves Ruth. In the family way, Ruth finds refuge in a boardinghouse where she meets Al Bryant, an aspiring writer. Ruth tells Al her life story, and he makes it into a bestselling novel and then into a play. Jimmy sees the play and comes to his senses, winning Ruth's forgiveness.
After the death of their abusive father, two estranged twin brothers must reunite and sell off his property.
A famous singer has returned to his home town in the countryside. He stumbles upon his old girlfriend and realizes he still has feelings for her.
Drowning in debt, child support and bills all while white knuckling it through sobriety, Francis is coming undone. When his roommate, Shelly, goes missing, Francis is thrown headlong into her private world; a slip stream of money, violence and terrifying allegiances.
Two sisters set out from Warsaw to Kharkiv to pick up their seriously injured father.
Texas-border gunrunners kill a federal agent, whose son comes looking for revenge.
Seo-yeon likes Jin-woo, her friend since high school. She is satisfied with their current relationship where she hides her feelings and stay as a friend. Jin-woo is not greedy because he didn't have a girlfriend for a long time. Dong-hyeon, who secretly likes Seo-yeon, knows that Jin-woo and Seo-yeon like each other, but he doesn't say anything. As time went by, Dong-hyeon found out that Seo-yeon was unlikely to like him, and asked Seo-yeon to sleep with him because she will connect him to Jin-woo. The two men's mixed love between a woman is just beginning.
Ton Chard is a vicious murderer, who terrifies people with his crimes. He is protected by his father, the powerful Shi Fong, ruler of the district. Su Ma offers herself to seek and arrest the criminal. Once done that, she has to take him to the law court where he will be judged. But Shi Fong will do everything to stop her.
Sophie and Megan's game of Mummies and Daddies, reveals an awful lot about Mummy and Daddy.
Anna Karenina in modern realities.
In the wake of last week’s Backwoods Bloodbath (review here) release, MVM offer up another similarly abysmal slice of no-budget drudgery in the form of Razor’s Ring. Here the story follows protagonist Scott (Casey), a businessman out for his morning run when he comes across ruthless ex-con couple Razor and Julie (Schilens and Wharton). After witnessing them callously run over a dog on the road, Scott has a gun pulled in his face and is forced to join them on their Death Race 20000-inspired joy ride as the pair attempt to gain a better “score” than their partner.
“We never know how high we are till we are called to rise” could be the motto of this stunningly filmed, high impact and suspenseful motion picture that is based on a true story. Solomon Kalushi Mahlangu is a teenage hawker who is drawn into the liberation movement to fight against an oppressive apartheid South African government. When he and his comrades are accosted by police while on a mission he is charged with two counts of murder. He is in a fight for his life and must prove his innocence.
Dinu is a poor village man who earns his living through welding. However, his encounter with a town girl changes his thoughts and perceptions about life.
It is a daring idea: to grow food from old mattresses in a desolate camp at the edge of a war zone. When a refugee scientist meets two quirky professors, they must confront their own catastrophes - and make a garden grow. Short film now streaming on Waterbear.com.
Scheming mice Hubie and Bertie convince a cat that he is, in fact, a lion.
Ship engineer Jim Taggert is rescued from a torpedoed tramp steamer by Joe Morgan, an American gangster that found New York too hot for him, and has become a fisherman operating from an out-of-the-way island off of the coast of South America. Morgan makes his headquarters at the Halfway House run by the parents of Maria Styx as a bar and dance resort catering to the planters and traders of the island. Taggert finds himself practically a prisoner along with a group of American girls acting as entertainers at the resort. Taggert shadows Morgan in his activities in a remote cove and finds that Morgan is supplying German U-boat commanders with torpedoes, but does not know that Morgan has rigged the torpedoes with clock devices that explode when at sea and sinks the U-boats.
