Social & External
During World War II, Taiwan was part of the Japanese Empire. This documentary explores the experiences of Taiwanese soldiers, doctors, and overseas residents in Southeast Asia during that time. Using cross-generational memory dialogues, family letters, diaries, and videos, the film addresses the complexities of Taiwan's historical memory and diverse identities during that period.
The youngest protagonist of the documentary is Wartburg, an automobile over 50 years of age. The car is still on the road, driven by Bogdan, a 70-year-old who is taking his mother to visit the German factory where she was forced to work during WWII. In this road movie which takes place between Majdanpek and Germany, the trip becomes a journey into the past, retracing memories from the war and revealing a unique relationship between an old son and his elderly mother.
October 1945. A young Japanese boy in the devastated city of Nagasaki, two months after the atomic bomb, carries on his back the lifeless body of his younger brother. An American military photographer, Joe O'Donnell, took a picture of the boy standing stoically near a cremation pit. No one knows the subject's name, but the photo has become an iconic image of the human tragedy of nuclear war. This documentary follows the continuing efforts to deepen understanding of the photograph, while exploring the fate of thousands of atomic-bomb orphans and their struggles to survive the aftermath of World War II.
Located nearly 80 kilometres north of Berlin, Germany, the former municipality of Ravensbrück was home to a prison between 1939 and 1945 that became a concentration camp designed specifically for women. It was built by order of Heinreich Himmler, a high dignitary of the Third Reich and head of the SS. Of the more than 130,000 people who were deported there, almost 90,000 never returned. Based on witnesses, international experts and computer-generated images, the document reveals the atrocities committed in Ravensbrück.
A depiction of the last living generation of German participants in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.
Recounts the harrowing end of World War II through the eyes of 24 men who lived through the events and using never-before-seen footage.
During the Nuremberg Trials, the victors of the Second World War judge those responsible for the Third Reich.
On the Pacific front, towards the end of World War II, Japan's imperial armed forces launched 'kamikaze' attacks - suicide missions by aircraft laden with bombs. It was a mad operation with no hope of returning alive, but the nation went wild, and the attacks continued for ten months, literally until the very last day of the war. Close to 4,000 Japanese airmen died, and nearly 7,000 Allied military personnel were killed, and thousands more were injured by the attacks. How could this happen? Utilising 15 years' worth of extensive interviews with US and Japanese World War II veterans, Takayuki Oshima’s film delves into the mechanism of how a crazed madness swept through an entire nation.
In 1915 a young, charismatic Japanese man with a mysterious past entered into the Appalachian culture of Asheville, North Carolina, is suspicioned a spy, targeted by the Klan, but perseveres with a passion for photography and the mountains he adopts, bringing to life Great Smoky Mountains National Park & the Appalachian Trail.
1981: for the first time, contemporary witnesses of the Holocaust speak on German television in the two-part documentary "Witnesses - Testimonies to the Murder of a People" - at prime time on the first channel. Only 36 years after the Second World War, Bremen filmmaker Karl Fruchtmann has created a counter-design to the US drama series "Holocaust". While there are hardly any people left today who can personally recount their experiences of the Holocaust, there were still many contemporary witnesses in the early 1980s for whom the murder of the European Jews was still very present. Karl Fruchtmann interviewed 60 survivors of the Nazi concentration camps in Israel and Poland, the tapes are in the archives of Radio Bremen, almost 80 hours of interviews, a historical legacy! Only a small part of them has been published so far.
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.
Intimately following 1st and 6th graders at a public elementary school in Tokyo, we observe kids learning the traits necessary to become part of Japanese society.
A "know-your-enemy" propaganda film similar to "Know Your Enemy: Japan" and "My Japan", films about Japan with the same objective. It contains a history of the prelude to WW II, the death camps and other Nazi war crimes, and commentary on the character of the German people. Directed by Frank Capra, this film is in essentially the same format as his "Why We Fight" series. It was intended to be shown to American troops participating in the invasion and occupation of Germany. But by the time it was ready, events had overtaken it -- Germany was already well on its way to falling -- so the film was shelved. Although it is readily available for public-domain viewing on the Internet, it has never been widely distributed or shown.
After the capture of Shanghai, Japanese soldiers make a trip to Suzhou.
Marco Paolini interviews Mario Rigoni Stern about—among other things—his well-known experience as a soldier on the Eastern front during WWII, culminating in the infamous retreat of the Italian troops, the difficult reintegration into civilian life after the war, his relationship with his literary work and with his ancestral land, the Asiago Plateau.
Using masterfully restored footage from recently declassified images, The Bomb tells a powerful story of the most destructive invention in human history. From the earliest testing stages to its use as the ultimate chess piece in global politics, the program outlines how America developed the bomb, how it changed the world and how it continues to loom large in our lives. The show also includes interviews with prominent historians and government insiders, along with men and women who helped build the weapon piece by piece.
