Night Witches
Documentary about the female fighter pilots in the 588th Night Bomber Regiment of the Soviet Union. In small planes made out of plywood and canvas they risked their lives every night during the last part of the second world war.
A lost masterpiece of British documentary cinema from 1945
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).
Documentary about the female fighter pilots in the 588th Night Bomber Regiment of the Soviet Union. In small planes made out of plywood and canvas they risked their lives every night during the last part of the second world war.
This film takes a look at the French concentration camp at Rivesaltes. It does not deal with the site of memory but rather memories of the site through the concrete and physical data visible on the ground perceived as a holed-out space mined by disappearance, in particular the buildings, which subsist as ruins. This film is less preoccupied with drawing lessons from history than fuelling the present with a history that, like a blinding mirror, is of the utmost concern.
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In 1942, in the midst of World War II, Nazi Germany occupied France. The Resistance launched numerous escape networks to help people escape from Nazi to the allied Europe. Among them there was the network of escapes that acted in secret between Mendibe-Orbaizeta, a network so secret that it did not even have a name. Spies, clandestine networks, smuggling, solidarity, resistance, hope... All this and more is the documentary 'Sans nom sarea' (Sans Nom Network).
Annita Malavasi was just 22 when the Germans occupied Italy, their former allies, in 1943. As a partisan in the Italian resistance named “Laila”, she moved throughout the Apennines with and between fighting units, delivering information, transporting weapons, and taking part in battles. She spent over a year in the Apennines, fighting against the German occupation. At the same time, she had to assert herself against the men of the mountain villages. By the end of the war, Laila had risen among the ranks to become one of the few female commanders in the Italian resistance. This film chronicles the story of a lifelong struggle for emancipation that began with the battle for Italy’s liberation from fascism. Laila and her two comrades, Gina “Sonia” Moncigoli and Pierina “Iva” Bonilauri talk about their time in the Resistenza and what it meant to them and many other women.
Berlin 1945 time-travels into the city’s most fateful year through the eyes of those, who experienced it: German people and Allied soldiers. A fast paced collage creates an in-the-moment narrative of how the war was won and lost. Hitlerboy Dirk and Goebbels watch their world implode, while Alice fears for her children in Auschwitz and Russian soldier Victor walks through the plundered Chancellery. When it’s all over, Germans learn democracy and socialism. Giving voice to Soviet, US, UK and French soldiers as well as to the German population anxiously awaiting the outcome of the fighting. BERLIN 1945 creates an innovative, comprehensive narrative of how the war was won and lost, how the city was liberated and how it emerged from the rubble.
Learn how the longest reigning monarch in British history was shaped by World War II. Princess Elizabeth’s experiences during the war mirrored those of the public and helped shape her into the Queen she is today.
In 1941 Hitler deported over 2000 British men, women and children from the Channel Islands to the heart of Nazi Germany. It was a terrifying journey into the unknown and some killed themselves rather than go. Others had just hours to pack one bag, destroy their pets and leave. However, the initial horror of the camps and the struggle to survive in the primitive conditions was replaced with a determination not just to survive, but to thrive, as Hitler's crime created one of the most bizarre episodes of the war.
In 1940 the Channel Islands became the only part of Britain to fall under Nazi rule. Now in this film Islanders speak from the heart about one of the most extraordinary periods in our history. Reliving in their own words the horror of the first air raids, the shock of occupation and the islands' gradual five year long decent into privation and starvation before experiencing the capitulation of the German forces and the joy of liberation.
As soon as Hitler's forces occupied the Channel Islands in 1940 he ordered a series of fortifications to defend the only British territory he ever conquered. The problem was he never stopped - pouring men, concrete and weapons into the islands. By 1944 his officers talked of the Fuehrer's inselwahn - his 'island madness' and the Channel Islands had become the most fortified place on earth.
In 1940, carried on a wave of rumour and panic, thirty thousand Channel Islanders fled their homes, their livelihoods and the islands for five long years in exile. Arriving in England with just one small case and only twenty pounds in cash, they were sent by rail across the country from Oldham to Glasgow. Children separated from parents, all cast adrift in an alien culture. Homeless and jobless, the adventures that befell them helped forge friendships the length and breadth of Great Britain which survive to this day. This is their story.
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The story of the more than nine thousand Spaniards who were interned in the Nazi concentration camps, through the testimony of a group of survivors who tell what life and death were like in Mauthausen, Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Ravensbrück.
The Danish ambassador to Washington declares himself to be the sole representative of a free Denmark during the Nazi occupation of the country.
14 September 1943: The legendary submarine Y1 “Katsonis” was sunk north of the island of Skiathos by the German submarine chaser UJ 2101. Through the book of XO Elias Tsoukalas who escaped capture and had to swim for nine hours to reach shore, secret documents, and crew members’ diaries, the documentary unfolds the human stories woven around the submarine. Seventy-five years later, with the support of the Hellenic Navy, we search for the submarine sunk at 253 metres depth and film the wreck for the very first time.
Ilze Burkovska, a little girl who is obsessed with stories of World War II and will be a filmmaker in a distant future, lives in Latvia under the totalitarian boot of the Soviets and the ominous shadow of the many menaces and horrors of the Cold War.
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In the 1930's an entire nation was brainwashed. It was manipulated by masters of propaganda and the arcane arts. The result was the deaths of millions of people. They created a messiah, a god on Earth. His name was Adolf Hitler and he would become the greatest master of manipulating the hearts and souls of mankind in recorded history. From mass hypnosis to blatant propaganda, from control of the media, to eradicating the opposition, all methods were employed. This is the story of how that apocalyptic agenda was brought to fruition and the methods used to control the minds of men, women and children. This is the story of Nazi Propaganda. "Insightful and well researched." - United Media Network. "The true horror of the Nazis revealed." - Extreme DVD. "The advent of manipulative advertising as we know it today." - Flatlands.
Germany, 1945. The War is over, and it has left a slew of devastated families in its wake. Among them are Maria and her mother, two refugees who find themselves working on a farm in the German countryside after they are forced out of their home by violence and political upheaval. It is there that little Maria makes an unlikely friend: an American soldier — an enemy soldier — who, through one act of unnecessary kindness, teaches Maria and her family a powerful lesson in compassion and humanity during the most inhumane of times.