What does Cinema know, that we don't?
Film journalist and critic Rüdiger Suchsland examines German cinema from 1919, when the Republic of Weimar is born, to 1933, when the Nazis come into power. (Followed by Hitler's Hollywood, 2017.)
Self - Narrator (voice)
Self - Film Historian
Self - Historian
Self - Cultural Critic
Self - Politician (archive footage)
Self - Politician (archive footage)
22 Apr 2009
In 1937, during the height of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Imperial Japanese Army has just captured Nanjing, then-capital of the Republic of China. What followed was known as the Nanking Massacre, or the Rape of Nanking, a six week period wherein tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed.
11 Feb 2002
Fulton and Pepe's 2000 documentary captures Terry Gilliam's attempt to get The Man Who Killed Don Quixote off the ground. Back injuries, freakish storms, and more zoom in to sabotage the project.
02 May 1979
Oskar Matzerath is a very unusual boy. Refusing to leave the womb until promised a tin drum by his mother, Agnes, Oskar is reluctant to enter a world he sees as filled with hypocrisy and injustice, and vows on his third birthday to never grow up. Miraculously, he gets his wish. As the Nazis rise to power in Danzig, Oskar wills himself to remain a child, beating his tin drum incessantly and screaming in protest at the chaos surrounding him.
04 Oct 1987
A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.
31 May 2024
This is the extraordinary true story of Trudy Ederle, the first woman to successfully swim the English Channel. Through the steadfast support of her older sister and supportive trainers, she overcame adversity and the animosity of a patriarchal society to rise through the ranks of the Olympic swimming team and complete the 21-mile trek from France to England.
01 Dec 1933
An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time. (Silent short, voiced in 1937 and 1996.)
03 Jun 1987
Elliot Ness, an ambitious prohibition agent, is determined to take down Al Capone. In order to achieve this goal, he forms a group given the nickname “The Untouchables”.
06 Dec 2005
In the years before World War II, a penniless Japanese child is torn from her family to work as a maid in a geisha house.
25 Oct 1996
Michael Collins plays a crucial role in the establishment of the Irish Free State in the 1920s, but becomes vilified by those hoping to create a completely independent Irish republic.
07 May 1982
No overview found
02 Apr 2009
A true-story account of a German businessman who saved more than 200,000 Chinese during the Nanjing massacre in 1937-38.
03 Dec 1998
Alain Lefevre is a boxer paid by a Marseille mobster to take a dive. When he wins the fight he attempts to flee to America with the mobster's girlfriend Katrina. This plan fails and he seeks escape by joining the foreign legion. As part of the legion he tangles with abusive lieutenant Steinkampf and bonds with legionnaires Luther, Mackintosh and Rosetti.
12 Feb 2014
On February 26, 1920, Robert Wiene's world-famous film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari premiered at the Marmorhaus in Berlin. To this day, it is considered a manifesto of German expressionism; a legend of cinema and a key work to understand the nature of the Weimar Republic and the constant political turmoil in which a divided society lived after the end of the First World War.
10 Aug 2021
Elected in November 1932, as the economic crisis ravaged the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt immediately put all his campaign promises into action: it was time for the "New Deal". This bold plan, designed to turn around a nation on the brink of collapse, where unemployment was at an all-time high and the working poor were suffering from the precariousness of the job market, was intended to give hope to a country that had been battered before anything else. Once he came to power, the new president from the Democratic Party immediately passed some fifteen laws designed to revive the economy.
01 Jul 2009
Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger's charm and audacity endear him to much of America's downtrodden public, but he's also a thorn in the side of J. Edgar Hoover and the fledgling FBI. Desperate to capture the elusive outlaw, Hoover makes Dillinger his first Public Enemy Number One and assigns his top agent, Melvin Purvis, the task of bringing him in dead or alive.
05 Sep 2008
New York, 1937. A teenager hired to star in Orson Welles' production of Julius Caesar becomes attracted to a career-driven production assistant.
09 Jul 2023
Explore how one man's relentless drive and invention of the atomic bomb changed the nature of war forever, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and unleashed mass hysteria.
07 Nov 2003
Lars von Trier challenges his mentor, filmmaker Jørgen Leth, to remake Leth’s 1967 short film The Perfect Human five times, each with a different set of bizarre and challenging rules.
08 Aug 2002
Somewhere in Australia in the early 20th century outback, an Aboriginal man is accused of murdering a white woman. Three white men are on a mission to capture him with the help of an experienced Indigenous man.
14 Apr 2023
No overview found