Nazi troops massacre 30,000 Jews over a three-day period in September 1941. Babyn Yar ravine in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Social & External
This documentary about WW II, composed of clandestine Allied film takes and German Wochenschaubilder, focuses on the French Resistance, especially the heroic but disastrous battle of the Vercors plateau in July 1944, where German troops mercilessly slaughtered the Maquis and the inhabitants.
The filmmaker's father and uncle, Norm and Stan, are third generation Japanese Americans. They are "all American" guys who love bowling, cards and pinball. Placed in the Amache internment camp as children during World War II, they don't think the experience affected them that much. But in the course of navigating the maze of her father's and uncle's pursuits while simultaneously trying to inquire about their past, the filmmaker is able to find connections between their lives now and the history that was left behind.
It was one of the great crimes of the Second World War: from 1941 to 1944, a total of 872 days, the siege and starvation of Leningrad by the German Wehrmacht on Hitler's orders lasted. Over a million people fell victim to the blockade, most of them dying of hunger. Countless of these starving people wrote diaries with the last of their strength, and cameramen filmed in the paralyzed city. Evidence from the hell of the siege, many of the film recordings, but above all the written memories on which this documentary on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation is based, remained under lock and key after the war. The voices of those who had suffered through this terrible time should not be heard by anyone, because they did not fit the pathos of the Leningrad heroic song that was officially sung. Most of the recordings come from women. The writers feared neither the enemy nor the Communist Party or Stalin, who often proved incompetent in providing for the population.
A documentary short film about the genocide at the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia in World War II.
The story of J. Robert Oppenheimer's role in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II.
Story of a man who, at the end of the 1940s, attempted to cross the Czechoslovak border illegally like many others to escape the communist regime and became a victim of the historically documented game of the security forces of the totalitarian regime, the so-called Kameny action. The project of the Miroslav Ondříček Film Academy in Písek is the debut of screenwriter and director Martin Kopp.
A look at the parallel lives of Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler and how they crossed with the creation of the film “The Great Dictator,” released in 1940.
Parallels are drawn between Abraham Lincoln's presidency and the presidency of Donald Trump. Not since 1860 have the Democrats so fanatically refused to accept the result of a free election. That year, their target was Lincoln. They smeared him. They went to war to defeat him. In the end, they assassinated him.
The film is based solely on footage shot in Warsaw in 1939 by Julien Hequembourg Bryan. This American filmmaker and photographer documented life in Poland, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany between 1935 and 1939. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, he arrived in Warsaw, where he shot a number of films documenting the city under siege, and is said to be the only foreign correspondent in the Polish capital at the time. Bryan also took the first colour photographs of wartime Warsaw.
Knocking opens the door on Jehovah's Witnesses. They are moral conservatives who stay out of politics and the Culture War, but they won a record number of court cases expanding freedom for everyone. They refuse blood transfusions on religious grounds, but they embrace the science behind bloodless surgery. In Nazi Germany, they could fight for Hitler or go to the concentration camps. They chose the camps. Following two families who stand firm for their controversial and misunderstood Christian faith, KNOCKING reveals how one unlikely religion helped to shape history beyond the doorstep.
A 15 minute documentary utilizing archival Super 8 film footage and original animation about a father fulfilling his dream of reconnecting his 5 small children to the steps of his own father when he fought for the Canadian military in WW2 through a trip to Europe in 1973.
Martha Gellhorn, Ruth Cowan, Dickey Chappelle: Three tenacious journalists who forged legendary reputations as war correspondents during a time when battlefields were considered no place for a woman. Their repeated delegation to the sidelines to cover the “woman’s angle” succeeded in expanding the focus of war coverage to bring home a new kind of story— a personal look at the human cost of war. Featuring an abundance of archival photos and interviews with modern female war correspondents, as well as actresses bringing to life the written words of these remarkable women.
The story of the unjust incarceration of Japanese Americans and the loss of civil rights.
October 24, 1944, the world’s greatest battle at sea begins in the Philippines. Japan’s navy gambles on a decisive victory against the United States to turn the tide of World War II. Instead, Musashi, its top-secret super battleship, ends up at the bottom of the ocean.
In June 1941, the Extraordinary Defense Headquarters of Leningrad, under the leadership of Zhdanov and Voroshilov, decided to build the Luga defensive line. Heavy fighting west of Pskov forced units of the front to withdraw, and on July 9, Pskov was also abandoned. The battles in the Luga direction held back the enemy. The first attacks of the Germans, intending to cross the Luga line on the move, were repulsed with heavy losses for them.
A story about the tragic events in the life of besieged Leningrad from September 1941 to January 1943.
Shortly before Christmas 1744, Vienna, the center of power in the Habsburg Empire, is the scene of a disastrous drama with repercussions for the whole of Europe. Against the spirit of enlightenment and tolerance, the very young Maria Theresa orders the expulsion of the allegedly disloyal Jews from Prague.
In February 1939, more than 20,000 Americans filled Madison Square Garden for an event billed as a “Pro-American Rally.” Images of George Washington hung next to swastikas and speakers railed against the “Jewish controlled media” and called for a return to a racially “pure” America. The keynote speaker was Fritz Kuhn, head of the German American Bund. Nazi Town, USA tells the largely unknown story of the Bund, which had scores of chapters in suburbs and big cities across the country and represented what many believe was a real threat of fascist subversion in the United States. The Bund held joint rallies with the Ku Klux Klan and ran dozens of summer camps for children centered around Nazi ideology and imagery. Its melding of patriotic values with virulent anti-Semitism raised thorny issues that we continue to wrestle with today.
The account of keepers of the Warsaw Zoo, Jan and Antonina Zabinski, who helped save hundreds of people and animals during the Nazi invasion.
When Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1944-45, their terrible discoveries were recorded by army and newsreel cameramen, revealing for the first time the full horror of what had happened. Making use of British, Soviet and American footage, the Ministry of Information’s Sidney Bernstein (later founder of Granada Television) aimed to create a documentary that would provide lasting, undeniable evidence of the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes. He commissioned a wealth of British talent, including editor Stewart McAllister, writer and future cabinet minister Richard Crossman – and, as treatment advisor, his friend Alfred Hitchcock. Yet, despite initial support from the British and US Governments, the film was shelved, and only now, 70 years on, has it been restored and completed by Imperial War Museums under its original title "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey".
In 1933, Welsh journalist Gareth Jones travels to Ukraine, where he experiences the horrors of a famine. Everywhere he goes he meets henchmen of the Soviet secret service who are determined to prevent news about the catastrophe from getting out. Stalin’s forced collectivisation of agriculture has resulted in misery and ruin—the policy is tantamount to mass murder.
At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, senior Nazi officials meet to determine the manner in which the so-called "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" can be best implemented.
An in-depth investigation into the private world of the American writer J. D. Salinger (1919-2010), who lived most of his life behind the impenetrable wall of a self-imposed seclusion: how his dramatic experiences during World War II influenced his life and work, his relationships with very young women, his obsessive writing methods, his many literary secrets.
In post-World War II America, a woman, rebuilding her life in the suburbs with her husband, kidnaps her neighbor and seeks vengeance for the heinous war crimes she believes he committed against her.
In the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, Jews rise against the Nazis.
The true story of photographer Elizabeth "Lee" Miller, a fashion model who became an acclaimed war correspondent for Vogue magazine during World War II.
Five Jewish Hungarians, now US citizens, tell their stories: before March 1944, when Nazis began to exterminate Hungarian Jews, months in concentration camps, and visiting childhood homes more than 50 years later. An historian, a Sonderkommando, a doctor who experimented on Auschwitz prisoners, and US soldiers who were part of the liberation in April 1945.
British RAF Wing Commander James Wright is captured by the Japanese during WWII and forced to fight in brutal hand-to-hand combat. The Japanese soldiers get more than they bargained for when Wright’s years of martial arts training in Hong Kong prove him to be a formidable opponent.
The true story of how businessman Oskar Schindler saved over a thousand Jewish lives from the Nazis while they worked as slaves in his factory during World War II.
The remarkable true-life survival story of a Jewish boy hiding and being hunted in the forests of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, based on Maxwell Smart's memoir.
Set between the two World Wars and based on true historical events, Bitter Harvest conveys the untold story of the Holodomor, the genocidal famine engineered by the tyrant Joseph Stalin. The film displays a powerful tale of love, honour, rebellion and survival at a time when Ukraine was forced to adjust to the horrifying territorial ambitions of the burgeoning Soviet Union.
A Russian military propaganda film about the tank commander Kalashnikov, severely injured in battle in 1941. The accident leaves him incapacitated and unable to return to the front line. While recovering in the hospital, he begins creating the initial sketches of what will become one of the world’s most legendary weapons. A self-taught inventor is only 29 when he develops the now iconic assault riffle — the AK-47. Shot in occupied Crimea.
The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp.
A 5-year-old girl embarks on a harrowing quest for survival amid the sudden rise and terrifying reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
The incredible, untold true story of how a group of prisoners attempt a seemingly impossible escape from the first Nazi death camp in order to provide the first eyewitness account of the Holocaust.
The fate of a Hungarian Jewish family throughout the 20th century.
Pennsylvania, 1956. Frank Sheeran, a war veteran of Irish origin who works as a truck driver, accidentally meets mobster Russell Bufalino. Once Frank becomes his trusted man, Bufalino sends him to Chicago with the task of helping Jimmy Hoffa, a powerful union leader related to organized crime, with whom Frank will maintain a close friendship for nearly twenty years.
As the Russian invasion begins, a team of Ukrainian journalists trapped in the besieged city of Mariupol struggle to continue their work documenting the war's atrocities.
