Documentary that follows the lives of several Jewish refugees who fled to Shanghai during WWII.
Social & External
Annie Witting (voice)
Adolf Stopfer (voice)
A captivating and personal detective story that uncovers the truth behind the childhood of Michaël Prazan's father, who escaped from Nazi-occupied France in 1942 thanks to the efforts of a female smuggler with mysterious motivations.
"The Boy Of The Fish" follows Noon, a young boy living in a Syrian refugee camp, who finds solace and a sense of freedom in a whale-shaped doll he names "Bahr." Set against the challenging realities of camp life, Noon’s journey is both a story of resilience and a testament to the boundless imagination of childhood. Through vivid symbolism and a unique soundscape, the film explores themes of loss, hope, and the longing for freedom amidst confinement. Shot entirely on an iPhone due to restrictions in the conflict zone, the film combines raw authenticity with poetic depth to capture the emotional landscape of a young soul navigating adversity.
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".
For four years (1977-1981) Esaias Baitel documented a violent Parisian neo-Nazi gang. Having gained their trust, he was able to get close to them. Living among the gang members, he witnessed horrific events, and while hiding his real identity, he photographed a one-of-a-kind collection of gripping stills. Over thirty years have passed. Esaias Baitel has laid his camera down. He returns to the dark nights he spent in the City of Lights, the city where he lived a double life, going back and forth from the gang to the young family he had just started.
A documentary chronicling the adolescent years of Elie Wiesel and the history of his sufferings. Eliezer was fifteen when Fascism brutally altered his life forever. Fifty years later, he returns to Sighetu Marmatiei, the town where he was born, to walk the painful road of remembrance - but is it possible to speak of the unspeakable? Or does Auschwitz lie beyond the capacity of any human language - the place where words and stories run out?
This documentary explores the creation of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as designed by architect Peter Eisenman. Reaction of the German public to the completed memorial is also shown.
In this moving documentary, Oscar-nominated filmmakers Peter LeDonne and Steve Kalafer chronicle the extraordinary life of Immaculée Ilibagiza, a young African woman who escaped genocide in Rwanda and ultimately found refuge in the United States. Seeking shelter with an Episcopalian minister, Immaculée hid from her attackers inside a bathroom for three long months but stayed centered through prayer and faith.
A film about friendship in difficult times, Auschwitz.
In the aftermath of war, an extraordinary professor brings hope to children haunted by trauma-induced nightmares.
An analysis of The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell's controversial novel, published in 2006, which dissects the ruthless mechanisms of the Shoah from the detached point of view of Maximilian Aue, a high-ranking Nazi officer.
Forty years after the release of Claude Lanzmann’s monumental film Shoah, Guillaume Ribot reveals the director’s relentless pursuit to tell the untold, using only Lanzmann’s words and unseen footage from the masterpiece.
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.
Hamburg, Germany, 1939. Getting a passage aboard the passenger liner St. Louis seems to be the last hope of salvation for more than nine hundred German Jews who, desperate to escape the atrocious persecution to which they are subjected by the Nazi regime, intend to emigrate to Cuba.
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.
A documentary about the life of Jewish children forced to live in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
As the campaign to force Jews out of Germany ramps up, the American government blocks efforts to help rescue many of these displaced persons, and Americans' antisemitism only seems to get worse.
Let's keep it is a cinema documentary (99') about the still problematic attitude of the Republic of Austria towards the restitution of "aryanized" real estate which - for whatever reason - became the property of Austria after 1945. The film is also the director's bow to the victims of the darkest chapter of Austria's recent history. A chapter that seems to have been extended to a certain extent when it comes to restitution of looted property to the descendants of Holocaust victims.
A documentary-essay which shows Costică Axinte's stunning collection of pictures depicting a Romanian small town in the thirties and forties. The narration, composed mostly from excerpts taken from the diary of a Jewish doctor from the same era, tells the rising of the antisemitism and eventually a harrowing depiction of the Romanian Holocaust.
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.
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.
