Stories of 12 gay and lesbian survivors of Nazism and the Holocaust.
An American family visits a concentration camp in Germany. At the museum, the father makes the acquaintance of an older man who questions his prejudices.
As a result of the Holocaust and later, AIDS, the male homosexual community has sustained bitter losses and, according to Praunheim, lesbian women have now placed themselves at the head of the so-called queer movement. The female protagonists in the film represent two different generations; they also incorporate the past and present status of homosexuals in society.
A film about non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust.
An analysis of The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell's controversial novel, published in 2006, which dissects the ruthless mechanisms of the Shoah from the detached point of view of Maximilian Aue, a high-ranking Nazi officer.
The Polish city of Łódź was under Nazi occupation for nearly the entirety of WWII. The segregation of the Jewish population into the ghetto, and the subsequent horrors are vividly chronicled via newsreels and photographs. The narration is taken almost entirely from journals and diaries of those who lived–and died–through the course of the occupation, with the number of different narrators diminishing as the film progresses, symbolic of the death of each narrator.
As the campaign to force Jews out of Germany ramps up, the American government blocks efforts to help rescue many of these displaced persons, and Americans' antisemitism only seems to get worse.
À la recherche du Schindler polonais
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.
This is a story of faith, renewal and redemption. Joe Engel, with an unwavering will to live, overcame unimaginable horrors to become a treasured citizen, community leader, teacher and philanthropist.
Documentary brings the time of the Holocaust to life and provides insight into the mind of the organizer of this crime: Adolf Eichmann. The documentary contrasts Eichmann's statements and memories - documented in the original soundtrack - directly with those of Holocaust survivors. The picture of the person and the crime is rounded off by the many contemporary witnesses who were involved either in Eichmann's arrest or the subsequent trial - such as the doctors and psychologists who looked after him, the guards and police officers through to the interrogator, the public prosecutor and the judge at the trial.
Whitwell, TN is a small, rural community of less than two thousand people nestled in the mountains of Tennessee. Its citizens are almost exclusively white and Christian. In 1998, the children of Whitwell Middle School took on an inspiring project, launched out of their principal's desire to help her students open their eyes to diversity in the world and the horrors and enormity of the holocaust.
Jacqueline et les enfants de Montintin
Filmmaker Peter Hegedus embarks on the challenging journey to make Sorella's Story, an immersive 360° film set on the beaches of Latvia in December 1941, when thousands of Jewish Women and children perished at the hands of Nazi collaborators. Along the way Peter teams up with Jewish-Australian 90-year-old Ethel Davies whose family was also killed in the same massacre.
Secret Courage: The Walter Suskind Story
This documentary tells three stories about Jewish properties stored during the Second World War, their Jewish owners and their non-Jewish custodians.
With her slap of the Federal Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger in 1968, Beate Klarsfeld abruptly got known worldwide. The film highlights the significance of this act and its background. Beate Klarsfeld, born in Berlin in 1939 as Beate Künzel, is primarily known to people as "the woman with the slap" and as the Nazi hunter. In 1960 she went to Paris and met her future husband Serge Klarsfeld, whose father was deported to Auschwitz and murdered there. She was confronted with the darkest part of German history, about which she had learned nothing at school. Serge gave her books to read and made her actively deal with them. Since then, she has not let go of dealing with the crimes of the Nazi era. For them, it was always about "responsibility, not guilt".
A documentary film that tells the fascinating and incredible story of 13 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in former Czechoslovakia, during the II World War. These men and women, that back then were children, found a legendary Jewish-German character named Fredy Hirsch, who changed their lives forever. The work describes the terrible living conditions in Terezin Ghetto and; on the other hand, the approach to culture and art behind the walls of the concentration camp. Up to this moment, everything develops as a known story, but by the end of 1943 there is an unexpected turn when these children are deported together with their families to the extermination camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau. And there, in the middle of hell, they lived in.
The story of the only three minutes of footage —a home movie shot by David Kurtz in 1938— showing images of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk (Poland) before the beginning of the Shoah.
Serge Toubiana, director of the Cinémathèque française, sat down with director Claude Lanzmann in his office in Paris in January 2013 to discuss the making of his epic work. Their conversation, presented here, was recorded exclusively for the Criterion Collection.