Charcot: Secret Poles

Jack is poor, lonely and desperate to change his life. So when he's offered the chance to join an Arctic expedition, he jumps at it. After they reach the remote, uninhabited bay where they will camp for the next year, Gruhuken, Jack feels a creeping unease. One by one, his companions are forced to leave, and Jack realizes that he is not alone.

Through the streets of World War I Paris, Italian bohemian artist Modigliani attempts to outmaneuver bombs, policemen, girlfriends, and critics in a increasingly desperate search of a home for his art.

The reconstruction of Frederick Cook's alleged 1909 North Pole expedition.

Iranian Iradj Azimi directed this French historical drama re-creating events depicted in the famous 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa by Jean Louis Andre Theodore Gericault (1791-1824). The ill-fated voyage of the frigate Medusa begins when it departs Rochefort for Senegal in 1816. After striking a sandbar off the African coast, 150 civilians row safely to shore, but Captain Chaumareys (Jean Yanne) orders 140 soldiers and sailors onto a raft (minus supplies) and has it cut loose. Only 14 survive from the 140, creating a scandal back in France. Gericault (Laurent Terzieff) later talks to three of the survivors while researching his painting. Work on this film began in 1987, but sets destroyed by Hurricane Hugo caused delays, so the film was not completed until 1990. However, it then remained undistributed until an incident in which writer-director Azimi slashed his wrists in front of French Ministry of Culture officials.

Italiani all'Antartide

There, Robert Peary, an American explorer, thought more than 100 years ago, that the only way for a human being to reach the North Pole would be to have children with Inuits, "to create a super-race that would combine the Eskimo strength and the shrewdness of the Westerner." Following in the footsteps of this extravagant theory, this film essay marches in search of that super-race.

Tehran, Iran, August 19, 1953. A group of Iranian conspirators who, with the approval of the deposed tyrant Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, have conspired with agents of the British MI6 and the US CIA, manage to put an end to the democratic government led by Mohammad Mosaddegh, a dramatic event that will begin the tragic era of coups d'état that, orchestrated by the CIA, will take place, over the following decades, in dozens of countries around the world.

This pioneering documentary film depicts the lives of the indigenous Inuit people of Canada's northern Quebec region. Although the production contains some fictional elements, it vividly shows how its resourceful subjects survive in such a harsh climate, revealing how they construct their igloo homes and find food by hunting and fishing. The film also captures the beautiful, if unforgiving, frozen landscape of the Great White North, far removed from conventional civilization.

A group of French soldiers, including the patrician Captain de Boeldieu and the working-class Lieutenant Maréchal, grapple with their own class differences after being captured and held in a World War I German prison camp. When the men are transferred to a high-security fortress, they must concoct a plan to escape beneath the watchful eye of aristocratic German officer von Rauffenstein, who has formed an unexpected bond with de Boeldieu.

Neil Oliver describes the worst ever railway accident in the UK, which happened a hundred years ago on 22 May 1915, in which three trains collided at Quintinshill near Gretna Green. One of the trains was a troop train taking soldiers to fight in World War I at the Battle of Gallipoli: many of the dead were in this train which caught fire due to escaped gas from the archaic gas lighting in the carriages. The cause of the crash was attributed to a catastrophic signalman's error, but Neil examines whether there were other contributory factors and whether there was a cover-up to prevent investigation of them, making convenient scapegoats of the signalmen.

Beautiful documentary by Osvaldur Knudsen about the eruption on Heimaey in the Vestmann Islands in 1973 (South of Iceland). The eruption destroyed some 30% of the town's houses and lasted for more than 5 months. Nice narration like in the old days and some nice sound(track) by Magnus Bl. Johannsson.

In November of 1918 as World War I was ending, a unit of American soldiers goes behind enemy lines to find a lost platoon of African American soldiers.

On April 18th, 1906, San Francisco witnessed its most devastating natural disaster – an earthquake that initiated a city-wide fire. The commanding officer of the U.S. Army base at the Presidio, Fred Funston, gathered citizens to fight the fire, patrol the streets, and rebuild the city – all without authorization.

1917, The Train from Hell is an historical documentary about a train accident during WW1.

"Adrift" is shot on the arctic island of Spitzbergen and in Norway. It combines time-lapse photography with stop-motion animation of the landscape. Through camera-angles and framing the film gradually dislocates the viewer from a stable base where one loses the sense of scale and grounding.

Benito Mussolini: Anatomy of a Dictator

The adventures of the Lafayette Escadrille, young Americans who volunteered for the French military before the U.S. entered World War I, and became the country's first fighter pilots.

Tímamót, or Changes in English. An upbeat, heartwarming story about Gudjon, Sigurbjorn and Steinthor who lived together for decades along with several other inhabitants in the Tjaldanes Institution, in a peaceful valley close to Reykjavik. When a decision is made to close down the institution, their life takes an unexpected turn and they discover a new side to life and to themselves.

Three Frenchmen go out on their first polar expedition to the largest polar desert in the world. Sarek, in the north of Sweden.

Catalan adventurer and elite kayaker Aniol Serrasolses shatters boundaries on his Arctic expedition to Norway when he descends a 20m-high ice waterfall - the largest ever recorded kayak drop from a glacial waterfall. He and his team have to voyage across the arctic circle to the Svalbard archipelago in Norway to search for the elusive and temporary waterfalls. Once there, they must climb the treacherous glacial cliffs and hike for kilometers over the ice shelf to access the glacial rivers which run over the frozen cliffs and fall from the huge heights into the sea.