This short-form documentary focuses on the true story of Alfons Heck, who as an impressionable 10-year-old boy became a high-ranking member of the Hitler youth movement during World War II. The story is told in his own words. This film originally aired as part of the "America Undercover" series on HBO.
Fallujah, November 2004. While bombings and massacres with unconventional weapons follow one another in the city, an American soldier and an Iraqi woman meet in a strange room. The story told, based on episodes that really happened, is interspersed with repertoire material and interviews with Simona Torretta.
DRONE is a documentary about the covert CIA drone war. Through voices on both sides of this new technology, DRONE reveals crucial information about the drone war in Pakistan and offers unique insights into the nature of drone warfare.
This film deals with the atrocities of war as portrayed by a film student who spends some time working as a medic. One of the duties he performed was to carry amputated limbs to the cremation furnace. This is a film about the collective madness that engulfed Sarajevo. A one-armed boy is troubled because he can't make big, firm snowballs; a man who lost both legs demonstrates walking on his stumps... The film and the director's story help us understand the commotion and tumult that have occurred in the minds of Sarajevans.
Stolen Kosovo is a Czech language documentary by director Václav Dvořák (b. 1948), about the Serbian–Albanian conflict in Kosovo. The documentary describes the situation, first in a short overview of the history of the area, followed by the 1990s conflicts and bombing of Serbia by NATO forces in 1999 and ending with the situation after the Kosovo War. The documentary focuses on the 1990s in the time of Slobodan Milošević's rule as well as on numerous interviews of Serbian civilians and, less, of Albanian insurgents against the Milošević regime.
A look at the feud between graffiti artists King Robbo and Banksy.
Documentary short film depicting American Army, Navy, Marine, Air Forces, and Coast Guard joint assaults on a Japanese-held island.
Habiba and Shah who, because of the wars fought in Afghanistan over the past 25 years, have experienced immense suffering, but who have survived to show how it is possible to be brave and moral in this world of sanctioned violence and lies. Shah, a former Mujaheddin soldier and land mine victim, works as a cobbler on the pavements of the ruined city of Kabul. One day, he noticed a pretty Tajik girl who had only one leg, and he began to court her. Amidst the chaos and violence, and despite all the obstacles of tradition and religion, Shah and Habiba were able to marry.
Teenage girl Mila found out a name of Serbian soldier who saved her from burnt house during the war in Bosnia. She starts looking for her mother Senada, sister Sanda and her father. All of their names are written on a monument dedicated to dissapeared people from the town. In turn of the events, she finds her father alive.
Harold Russell, an American soldier who lost his hands in a training accident, tells the story of his medical rehabilitation at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC, how he and his fellow amputees at the hospital at first despaired and then found new hope in the prostheses and training available to amputees through the Army's medical corps. Russell learns to wear and to operate the hooks which replace his hands and becomes competent to perform many tasks he had once thought no longer possible. Discharged from the Army, he is welcomed into Boston College by college president William J. Murphy, S.J.
Athens, 1983. The world press reports that 4-year old Bashir is killed in the assassination of his father, Mamoun Mraish, a top PLO lieutenant. Father and son are declared dead but when they arrive at the hospital Bashir turns out to be still alive. But if Bashir is fully alive today, what happened to the dream he and his father were believed to have died for?
The Bang Bang Club were four fearless young photographers who set out to expose the reality of Apartheid in South Africa - a battle that changed a nation but wound up almost destroying them.
An experimental documentary that explores Saudi Arabia's relationship with the U.S. and the role this has played in the war in Afghanistan.
In 2010 the Freedom Flotilla attempts to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. In international waters the flotilla is attacked by the Israeli army and 9 people are killed. 9 anonymous people. But the dead still have a name. In 2014 Gaza is attacked by Israel. 2131 Palestinians are killed, among them 513 children. 513 dead children. But the dead children still have names. The film is about a Jewish person who has made a political journey from the Vietnam war to Gaza. This person is the paediatrician Henry Ascher, who lost his fathers entire family in the Holocaust.
An anti-war film about the personal suffering behind the hard statistics, which show that more than four million Vietnamese died during the Vietnam War, as opposed to 58,000 Americans. We hear South and North Vietnamese, including émigrés to the United States, describing how huge numbers of friends met their deaths, caught as they were between government forces, the Vietcong, and the Americans; how political boundaries divided not only the country, but also families; how mothers deserted their children because their fathers were American soldiers; and how the war cruelly lingers on long after hostilities ceased, in the lives of children born crippled by chemical weapons.
For many, the name Malvinas/Falklands evokes an absurd war between England and Argentina in 1982. For Julieta Vitullo, the protagonist of this film, this tragic history becomes deeply personal 25 years later when she suffers a loss associated with her search to uncover that past, unfolding into a life-affirming struggle for renewal and rebirth. This film tells the story of two trips, one made in 2006 and the other in 2010. In the space between one trip and the next, between past and present, between the public and the private, between what can and cannot be told, the movie reflects on the possibilities of conveying extreme life experiences, presenting landscapes and sounds that suggest subtle contours of that shape, 'The Exact Shape of the Islands.'
Rotterdam 2040 is a film about the city’s future, departing from the principle of Gyz La Rivière that you can’t look ahead without considering your past (something that hasn’t always been Rotterdam’s strongest feature). At high speed, La Rivière reconstructs the history of Rotterdam from the time before the bombings until now, and expands the developments to the year 2040 (100 years after the bombing and the 700th anniversary of the city). La Rivière made a specific choice to expose his personal vision, which is sometimes radical or a little absurd. So no experts and no talking heads, but an assault of old and new imagery, held together by La Rivière as the narrator of the film. Although Rotterdam 2040 deals with architecture and urban renewal, it is actually a film about people. The subjective experience of the city by its (future) occupants mainly determines the parade of architectural blunders and suggestions for the future. All tongue-in-cheek of course.
A poignant documentary about the history of a family haunted by World War II. On the basis of archive material, documents left behind by her great-aunt Ro Miller and stories told by her father Eli Asser, Hella de Jonge reconstructs what happened to her family during, before and after the war. How they became aware of the danger, how they fled, how they hid, how they survived and how they died. And how, after the war was over, it continued to weigh on their lives. In Hella’s words, “The doctor advised my mother to have children, to help cope with the incredible loss.” A portrait of her grandmother, who died in the war, still hangs in her father’s living room. The filmmaker’s relationship with him has always been difficult. Fragments of memory never before discussed run together during an emotional journey embarked upon together by father and daughter to places of significance in the history of their family.
This documentary tries to capture the fresh sense of triumph in the eyes of the Egyptian soldiers after the 1973 war with Israel.
Using edited archive footage, mockery is made of Italy's dictator Benito Mussolini.