Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust

Girl next door, activist, so-called traitor, fitness tycoon, Oscar winner: Jane Fonda has lived a life of controversy, tragedy and transformation – and she’s done it all in the public eye. An intimate look at one woman’s singular journey.

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.

The rise and fall of Nazi Germany's terrifying secret police force from 1933 through 1945.

In 1908, amateur naturalist and pioneering filmmaker Percy Smith stunned early cinema goers with his footage of the juggling fly. Hailed as the father of Natural History film, Smith was a hugely influential visual pioneer, inventing many techniques that are still used today. Being both a genius and an eccentric, we follow his life from his earliest films, to the collapse of his house from his mould experiment to his ultimate suicide. We also meet Natural History icon Sir David Attenborough, who was so amazed by Smith’s films in the 1930s that they inspired him to get into natural history.

Germany, 1929. Helmut Machemer and Erna Schwalbe fall madly in love and marry in 1932. Everything indicates that a bright future awaits them; but then, in 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rise to power and their lives are suddenly put in danger because of Erna's Jewish ancestry.

Tucson, Arizona, September 1996. At the request of his son Martin, George Goldsmith tells him of his past in Nazi Germany as a member of a family of Jewish musicians and the strange history of the Jüdischer Kulturbund, a Jewish organization sponsored by Reichsminister Joseph Goebbels.

The story of black and mixed race people in Nazi Germany who were sterilised, experimented upon, tortured and exterminated in the Nazi concentration camps. It also explores the history of German racism and examines the treatment of Black prisoners-of-war. The film uses interviews with survivors and their families as well as archival material to document the Black German Holocaust experience.

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.

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.

A film about a district in Buda, which to this day cannot face the inconceivably cruel crimes committed by its former inhabitants.

The Holocaust. Certified crime

A documentary on the Z Channel, one of the first pay cable stations in the US, and its programming chief, Jerry Harvey. Debuting in 1974, the LA-based channel's eclectic slate of movies became a prime example of the untapped power of cable television.

Co-produced by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Research Institute, this Academy Award-winning documentary relates the harrowing story of Gerda Weissmann Klein and her journey of survival and remembering both before and after the war.

A Jewish boy living in Amsterdam at the onset of World War II is taken to a concentration camp with his parents. Based on the memoir of Holocaust survivor Jona Oberski.

Through interviews we meet some of the people who risked their lives to hide Jewish children during World War II and how this experience has continued to affect the survivors.

Hollywood is a town of tinsel and glamour; but there is another Hollywood, a place where maverick independent exploitation filmmakers went toe to toe with the big guys and came out on top.

Although at first sight this might look like a simple ‘making of DANCER IN THE DARK’, the later developments in the film reveal the whole drama of Lars von Trier’s inner life during the shooting process. All his doubts and insecurities in collaborating with the crew and actors - especially actresses - are exposed. The biggest drama started when Björk walked off the set. Nobody knew whether she would be back or not. Admitting that he feels threatened by women, who can ‘make him feel embarrassed’, the director gives this documentary the nature of a personal diary. When he discusses the importance, purpose and beauty of the use of a hundred cameras in a certain sequence or the meaning of the Dogma 95 rules, the audience is witnessing the process of the artist’s search. Is the pain that the director went through during the shooting really visible in the final result, as Lars von Trier claims in this film? (from: http://www.idfa.nl/)

Tomorrowland: 2010

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.

A documentary about the life of Jewish children forced to live in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.