Belarus between 1941 and 1944 was an apocalyptic place with nights lit by flames from hundreds of torched villages and with soil soaked in the blood of countless victims.
Social & External
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)
We’ve all heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most people have no idea how widespread and prevalent Jewish resistance to Nazi barbarism was. Instead, it’s widely believed “Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.” Filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel, and the U.S., Resistance – They Fought Back provides a much-needed corrective to this myth of Jewish passivity. There were uprisings in ghettos large and small, rebellions in death camps, and thousands of Jews fought Nazis in the forests. Everywhere in Eastern Europe, Jews waged campaigns of non-violent resistance against the Nazis.
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.
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.
Can a language save your life? Yes it can, even an ancient one from the 15th century. Saved by Language tells the story of Moris Albahari, a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo (born 1930), who spoke Ladino/Judeo-Spanish, his mother tongue, to survive the Holocaust. Moris used Ladino to communicate with an Italian Colonel who helped him escape to a Partizan refuge after he ran away from the train taking Yugoslavian Jews to Nazi death camps. By speaking in Ladino to a Spanish-speaking US pilot in 1944 he was able to survive and lead the pilot, along with his American and British colleagues, to a safe Partizan airport.
Between 1942 and 1944 some 24,916 Jews were deported from Belgium to Auschwitz. The roundups and deportations were organized and carried out by the Nazis with the - not always conscious - cooperation of Belgian authorities. The attitude of the authorities here varied from outright resistance to voluntary or unwitting collaboration.
For more than a decade, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler's right-hand man during the infamous Third Reich, assembled a collection of thousands of works of art that were meticulously catalogued.
While searching for her grandmother, the director comes across the story of three brothers who are torn between the fronts of political ideologies in the Third Reich and divided Germany: "the third brother" is the filmmaker's grandfather, who, in confronting her father, tries to overcome decades of speechlessness and, in the process, to understand where in the past her father's sense of family fell by the wayside.
A New Yorker journeys to the jungle in the Darien Gap of Panama to reconnect with an indigenous tribe he met and photographed 20 years ago. Their reunion highlights the profound power of photos and the human connection that transcends cultural barriers.
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?
In 1939, just finished the Spanish Civil War, Spanish republican photographer Francesc Boix escapes from Spain; but is captured by the Nazis in 1940 and imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp, in Austria, a year later. There, he works as a prisoner in the SS Photographic Service, hiding, between 1943 and 1945, around 20,000 negatives that later will be presented as evidence during several trials conducted against Nazi war criminals after World War II.
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.
A young adult's first-hand account of "accidentally becoming human again" after, and with, trauma induced depression. Lo-fi, vulnerable, and uniquely youthful, "The Afterlife" is a melancholic affirmation of life after death.
The secret Nazi death camp at Sobibor was created solely for the mass extermination of Jews. But on the 14th October 1943, in one of the biggest and most successful prison revolts of WWII, the inmates fought back.
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.
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.
For six female Holocaust survivors, liberation from the camps marked the beginning of a lifelong struggle.
The Holocaust is one of the most documented, witnessed and written about events in history, so why is Holocaust denial back on the political agenda? What has happened in the 75 years since the liberation of the camps to have so skewed the picture? And, if it matters, why does it matter?
Maryla Michalowski-Dyamant, born in Poland, survived Ravensbruck, Malchow, and Auschwitz, where she was the forced translator of the “Angel of Death”, Dr. Mengele. She dedicated her post-war life to publicly speaking of her survival to the young generations, so that it would never be forgotten or repeated. Alice and Serena, her daughter and granddaughter, explore how Maryla’s fight against intolerance can continue today, in a world where survivors are disappearing, and intolerance, racism and antisemitism are on the rise.
Every year since 2011, a unique beauty contest has been taking place in Haifa. The contestants are female survivors of the Holocaust. In the midst of this flashy spectacle, their personal traumas remain as deep as ever. There are many things about this contest that are controversial: it is organized by the right Zionist organization, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, and the dubious contest itself rises the public indignation of various speakers, including other survivors.
Rowe McDonald is a headstrong missionary who has life after his mission all figured out. When a fatal car crash interrupts his plans, he is given sixty days to return to life and finish his work. Now he must choose whether to lead the life he planned, or reach beyond himself to change the lives of others. What will he do? Who will he touch? How will he prepare to leave it all behind?
Kim Marsden inherits a cattle station near Alice Springs after the death of her father. Kim becomes convinced her father was murdered. She sends for a legendary local bushman called the Sundowner, who was one of her father's best friends.
After the Combiner Wars ended, Cybertron started to be rebuilt. However, an undead Starscream has been reincarnated as Trypticon, wreaking havoc around him. To combat this menace, Windblade gathers up a ragtag team of Transformers, including Optimus Prime and Megatron, to resurrect an ancient ally. And while some may be forever changed by the events, others may not emerge with their sparks intact.
‘RETURN’ follows Torstein Horgmo, Mikey Ciccarelli, Mons Røisland, Brandon Cocard, Brandon Davis, and Raibu Katayama as they push the boundaries of what can be accomplished snowboarding when innovative minds join forces.
An old man is isolated in his home. Haunted by the loss of his beloved, he embarks upon a journey to return to her.
A young man returns home for the weekend to discover the difficulty of juggling friends, parents, magic mushrooms and several thousand chickens.
A large number of drugs enter Kazakhstan from Afghanistan. To stop this, a special group must be created. The Ministry decides to send intelligence officer Oraz and two of his friends there, who participated in the war in Afghanistan and know the country well. The three veterans are joined by a young scout who despises the "old men". They will have to solve the drug problem, despite the conflict between two generations.
Two young man in love, Barney and Dimi, are on a trip to visit Dan, Barney's dying father. Dan is planning his suicide and wants Barney there.
Static images of an old country house are combined with voices of the past to evocative effect. Haunting and nostalgic, 'Return' conveys the life that exists in old, abandoned places.
When two acrobats are fired for fighting with punks in the audience, they go to live with an aunt who's being pressured to sell her house for a real estate development. The developer's nasty son, Lee Fu, decides to muscle the sale, and soon he's at war with the acrobats, plus their unlikely ally, an American named John who used to be Lee Fu's friend. The acrobats open a kung fu school, the scene of several battles with Lee Fu's thugs. A fight to the death, jail time, auntie's surprise decision, a budding acting career, a possessive girlfriend, a debilitating injury, a friendship that needs recalibrating, and Lee Fu's avenger are all in the mix before the end.
A girl is at school. Suddenly it's as if she can't breathe. As she runs down the stairs we follow her into her mind. It takes us deep into dark woods.
Tomoe Enjou is attacked by bullies from his old school and saved by Shiki Ryougi. He asks her to hide him at her place and admits that he killed someone. Several days later, there are still no broadcasts about the murder as if it didn't happen... and when the victims are found, they're alive and unharmed.
Owen, a young man is dissatisfied with his life. He heads into the forest to escape and learns a lot during his time there.
Tension mounts between a quadraplegic man and his wife as she prepares a bath for him.
A documentary filmmaker attempts to imagine, along with his father, his grandmother's experience at a labor camp during the holocaust.
Road of no Return follows the final nine days in the lives of four atypical hit men who are secretly brought together in a covert operation to fight the drug trafficking epidemic in the country.
The third installment of the infamous "is it real or fake?" mondo series sets its sights primarily on serial killers, with lengthy reenactments of police investigations of bodies being found in dumpsters, and a staged courtroom sequence.