Under the Radar: Burma

A hundred letters written by Portuguese women during the Salazar dictatorship were found by chance in a second-hand bookshop. By confronting today the women who wrote these letters with the ghosts of the past, and revealing important archive material, Letters to a Dictatorship takes us on an in-depth journey through the obscurantism that dominated Portugal for more than 50 years.

This is the original version of the much heralded "Raising The Bamboo Curtain" narrated and produced by legendary travel filmmaker Rick Ray. (Rick later sold partial rights to this program to another producer who hired Martin Sheen to narrate - that cut down and rewritten version is not the same). Sneaking his cameras past Burmese and Cambodian customs officials and getting around the country to produce one of the best travel docs ever made, Rick has outdone himself - again!

The city of Madrid as it appears in the Spanish films of the 1950s. A small tribute to all those who filmed and portrayed Madrid despite the dictatorship, censorship and the critical situation of industry and society.

In this special Clarkson, Hammond and May don’t just buy three knackered old lorries and drive miles through the beautiful landscapes of Burma. Oh dear no. They actually have to use their lorries to do something useful. They have to build a real, use able bridge over the River Kwai. On their way to the river they almost bring down Burma’s power supply, encounter the world’s least relaxing truck stop, race around the streets of a deserted capital, saddle up a trio of unhelpful horses and attend a completely deranged party.

In 1968, Orlando Lovecchio was made victim of a guerilla's bomb terrorist attack, which main objective was to fight against the Military Regime. Orlando lost one leg after the world-reckoned attack against the U.S. Consulate in Sao Paulo.

A documentary on the war between the Guatemalan military and the Mayan population, with first hand accounts by Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú.

Lissette's favorite aunt Adriana, who lives in Australia, is arrested in 2007 while visiting her family in Chile and accused of having worked for dictator Pinochet's notorious secret police, the DINA, and of having participated in the commission of state crimes. When Adriana denies these accusations, Lissette begins to investigate her story in order to film a documentary about her.

Street art, creativity and revolution collide in this beautifully shot film about art’s ability to create change. The story opens on the politically charged Thailand/Burma border at the first school teaching street art as a form of non-violent struggle. The film follows two young girls (Romi & Yi-Yi) who have escaped 50 years of civil war in Burma to pursue an arts education in Thailand. Under the threat of imprisonment and torture, the girls use spray paint and stencils to create images in public spaces to let people know the truth behind Burma's transition toward "artificial democracy." Eighty-two hundred miles away, artist Shepard Fairey is painting a 30’ mural of a Burmese monk for the same reasons and in support of the students' struggle in Burma. As these stories are inter-cut, the film connects these seemingly unrelated characters around the concept of using art as a weapon for change.

In 1944 Crimean Tatars has suffered a long road in exile. It was accompanied by famine, illness and loss. In the first years of exile, almost half of deported Crimean Tatars died. But those, who survived, dreamed of only one thing - to return to Crimea. The documentary 1944 tells about the tragedy of all Crimean Tatars through several separate life stories. They are cherished by each Crimean Tatar family and must be remembered by all generations to come.

The Documentary tells the story of Jane Vanini from the author's reflections on her militancy-building process. Starting with the meeting of the two during the “Jornadas de 2013”, we will look at Jane's path as we follow steps, from her hometown, Cáceres, to Concepcion, in Chile. It is the possibility of discussing this journey from a personal point of view that makes this project unique and takes us to social, political and human borders. This window is opened to us through Jane's 41 letters to her family, allowing us to glimpse nuances of her intimacy and militancy choices. It was while researching Jane's militancy that the author debated these reflections on his own militant career and the context in which it takes place. Telling Jane's trajectory, going through her family and religious formation and its implications for her activism was one of the moments of encounter between these two days.

It’s the last dictatorship of Europe, caught in a Soviet time-warp, where the secret police is still called the KGB and the president rules by fear. Disappearances, political assassinations, waves of repression and mass arrests are all regular occurances. But while half of Belarus moves closer to Russia, the other half is trying to resist…

After the World War I, Mussolini's perspective on life is severely altered; once a willful socialist reformer, now obsessed with the idea of power, he founds the National Fascist Party in 1921 and assumes political power in 1922, becoming the Duce, dictator of Italy. His success encourages Hitler to take power in Germany in 1933, opening the dark road to World War II. (Originally released as a two-part miniseries. Includes colorized archival footage.)

The Falklands War began on April 2, 1982, with the Argentine landing on the islands ordered by Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri, and culminated with the cessation of hostilities between Argentina and the United Kingdom of Great Britain on June 14, 1982. Through dynamic editing and the use of archival materials, the documentary considers the war as part of our recent past, but also opens up multiple questions and reflections on contemporary society and the future projection of what such a conflict generates for us Argentines.

Filled with raunchy laughs, this documentary compiles outrageous scenes from sex-comedies that shaped Brazil's "pornochanchada" boom of the 1970s.

A history of the political and social repression carried out by the ruthless regime of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco between 1936 and 1975 that focuses on the lives of gays and lesbians during those dark years and the death of the Spanish gay poet Federico García Lorca.

Inês Etienne Romeu was an opponent to the Brazilian's dictatorship. She was kidnapped, tortured and raped in jail, where she stayed for almost 100 days. She was later sentenced to life imprisonment. She stayed ten years in prison, from 1971 to 1979. Delphine Seyrig directed this film in 1974, when Inês was still in prison, protesting against this imprisonment and in support to Inês.

Amid the civil-military dictatorship implanted with the 1964 coup, Sergio Muniz had the idea of making a documentary about the action of the Death Squad. At the time, the press still had some freedom to disseminate the work of these death squads formed by police officers of various ranks, and that he acted on the outskirts of cities like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The victims of police repression (as today) were men, poor and black, and this condition is supposed criminals.

An account of the childhood and youth of the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, and how the hard experiences he lived during these formative years led him to write and publish his first major work when he was only 26 years old.

Argentine filmmaker Andrés Habegger embarks on a deeply personal journey in this documentary, seeking to recover memories and information about his father, Norberto Habegger, a journalist and Montonero activist who disappeared in Brazil in 1978 during a joint operation between the Argentine and Brazilian military. Traveling to places that were part of his life and revisiting old photos and his childhood diaries, the director fills in the gaps in a family history that was interrupted.

In the spring of 1974, a camera team from Studio H&S succeeded against the explicit orders of the Junta’s Chancellery, entered into two large concentration camps in the north of the country - Chacabuco and Pisagua - leaving with filmed sequences and sound recordings.