Part of BFI boxset Ration Books and Rabbit Pies: Films from the Home Front.
Social & External
On the 29th September 1945, the incomplete rough cut of a brilliant documentary about concentration camps was viewed at the MOI in London. For five months, Sidney Bernstein had led a small team – which included Stewart McAllister, Richard Crossman and Alfred Hitchcock – to complete the film from hours of shocking footage. Unfortunately, this ambitious Allied project to create a feature-length visual report that would damn the Nazi regime and shame the German people into acceptance of Allied occupation had missed its moment. Even in its incomplete form (available since 1984) the film was immensely powerful, generating an awed hush among audiences. But now, complete to six reels, this faithfully restored and definitive version produced by IWM, is being compared with Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955).
Proud Irishwoman Bridie Quilty journeys to Dublin while World War II rages across Europe. During her travels, she encounters J. Miller, who recruits her as a Nazi spy. She acquires the necessary information that leads to the breakout of a German spy who holds key information about the Allies' newest offensive plans. However, the arrival of British officer David Baynes and his romancing of Bridie lead to unexpected consequences.
Documentary film version of the stage show in which actress Cynthia Gates Fujikawa explores the story of her father, actor Jerry Fujikawa, who had a long career in films and television, most often as a stereotyped Asian. The daughter, in the course of searching out her late father's history, discovers many things that she had not known, among them that her father had spent time in Manzanar, the internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II, that he had had a family prior to hers, and that somewhere out there was a sister she had never known existed.
German-Jewish cabaret singer Nelly survived Auschwitz but had to undergo reconstructive surgery as her face was disfigured. Without recognizing Nelly, her former husband Johnny asks her to help him claim his wife’s inheritance. To see if he betrayed her, she agrees, becoming her own doppelganger.
A young girl becomes the great love of the Nazi leader's life. It spans the years between 1929 and 1945, and focuses on Hitler's obsessive relationship with his niece Geli Raubal, which eventually led to the girl's suicide, then goes on to tell the story of how Eva Braun became his wife.
In a totalitarian propaganda world ruled from above, a girl can be all it takes to spark off a revolution and challenge the MOTHERLAND.
Documentary on the main principles of Sun Tsu "Art of War" illustrated with examples from the second world war, the Vietnam war and the American civil war.
In May 1940, the fate of World War II hangs on Winston Churchill, who must decide whether to negotiate with Adolf Hitler or fight on knowing that it could mean the end of the British Empire.
The story of the dramatic fate of the Czech climber Josef speck and his comrades, executed by the Nazis in April 1945 in Theresienstadt.
Jim Gordon commands a unit of the famed Flying Tigers, the American Volunteer Group which fought the Japanese in China before America's entry into World War II. Gordon must send his outnumbered band of fighter pilots out against overwhelming odds while juggling the disparate personalities and problems of his fellow flyers.
Russia attacked Finland in late November 1939. This film tells the story of a Finnish platoon of reservists from the municipality of Kauhava in the province of Pohjanmaa/Ostrobothnia who leave their homes and go to war. The film focuses on the farmer brothers Martti and Paavo Hakala.
In August 1942, during the Second World War, Six Jewish children are trying to escape the Nazis. They are hidden by the resistance in the Chambord Castle, where paintings from Le Louvre are being stored as well. The Nazis are looking for paintings from private collections that would be hidden there as well.
By tracking scientists and Holocaust survivors in Lithuania, The Good Nazi tells the story of a Schindler-type Nazi officer who turned his back on his dark ideology and risked his life to save hundreds of Jews.
In the years before the Second World War, a tomboyish postulant at an Austrian abbey is hired as a governess in the home of a widowed naval captain with seven children, and brings a new love of life and music into the home.
A captured French Resistance fighter during World War II engineers a daunting escape from prison.
František Cepl is a young man from a simple family. He graduated from a real school and was going to study technology. When the occupation came, he had to work as a factory assistant. There he meets an older man named Telec, whom everyone knows as Hrabě. He impresses František with his ostentatious disdain for work and his shameless flirtation with women. František, whom the Count calls Papilio (butterfly butterfly), is filled with youthful ideals, while the Count, on the other hand, is an extract of the crudest individualism. He has worked his way up from a student at a business academy and a theatre actor to a member of a pre-war gallery. He blackmails, steals, drinks, abuses women and, in a way, Papilio himself.
Betrayed by an informant, Philippe Gerbier finds himself trapped in a torturous Nazi prison camp. Though Gerbier escapes to rejoin the Resistance in occupied Marseilles, France, and exacts his revenge on the informant, he must continue a quiet, seemingly endless battle against the Nazis in an atmosphere of tension, paranoia and distrust.
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