The Hidden Battle

Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.

Beginning with Guernica and the Chinese cities of Chongqing and Shanghai in 1937 and ending with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, World War Two saw a new art of warfare in the form of extensive, worldwide bombing campaigns.

An account of the last two centuries of the Anthropocene, the Age of Man. How human beings have progressed so much in such a short time through war and the selfish interests of a few, belligerent politicians and captains of industry, damaging the welfare of the majority of mankind, impoverishing the weakest, greedily devouring the limited resources of the Earth.

On the 29th September 1945, the incomplete rough cut of a brilliant documentary about concentration camps was viewed at the MOI in London. For five months, Sidney Bernstein had led a small team – which included Stewart McAllister, Richard Crossman and Alfred Hitchcock – to complete the film from hours of shocking footage. Unfortunately, this ambitious Allied project to create a feature-length visual report that would damn the Nazi regime and shame the German people into acceptance of Allied occupation had missed its moment. Even in its incomplete form (available since 1984) the film was immensely powerful, generating an awed hush among audiences. But now, complete to six reels, this faithfully restored and definitive version produced by IWM, is being compared with Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955).

Any given Sunday of 1974 in Spain, soccer games in several stadiums, the sarcastic voice of commentators, the inevitable presence of advertising. Goal! The victors and the defeated.

A video about Neo-Nazis originating in Sweden provides the starting point of an investigation of extremists' networks in Europe, Russia, and North America. Their propaganda is a message of hatred, war, and segregation.

One of Britain’s greatest landscape artists, Eric Ravilious, is killed in a plane crash while on commission as Official War Artist in Iceland in 1942. His life is as compelling and enigmatic as his art, set against the dramatic wartime locations that inspire him. This film brings to life this unique and still grossly undervalued British artist caught in the crossfire of war 80 years ago, whose legacy largely sank without trace, until now…

Starting with a Nazi plan to steal the Rimet Trophy from Italy during World War II, the story unfolds like a great caper film. Our hero, Ottorino Barassi, a mild-mannered Italian soccer official, tries to protect a valued treasure.

Nazi propaganda film about the Condor Legion, a unit of German "volunteers" who fought in the Spanish Civil War on the side of eventual dictator Francisco Franco against the elected government of Spain.

Film journalist and critic Rüdiger Suchsland examines German cinema from 1933, when the Nazis came into power, until 1945, when the Third Reich collapsed. (A sequel to From Caligari to Hitler, 2015.)

Following the tradition of military service in her family, Alene Duerk enlisted as a Navy nurse in 1943. During her eventful 32 year career, she served in WWII on a hospital ship in the Sea of Japan, and trained others in the Korean War. She became the Director of the Navy Nursing Corps during the Vietnam War before finally attaining the rank of Admiral in the U.S. Navy. Despite having no other women as mentors (or peers), Admiral Duerk always looked for challenging opportunities that women had not previously held. Her consistently high level of performance led to her ultimate rise to become the first woman Admiral.

Using never-before-seen footage, Japan's War In Colour tells a previously untold story. It recounts the history of the Second World War from a Japanese perspective, combining original colour film with letters and diaries written by Japanese people. It tells the story of a nation at war from the diverse perspectives of those who lived through it: the leaders and the ordinary people, the oppressors and the victims, the guilty and the innocent. Until recently, it was believed that no colour film of Japan existed prior to 1945. But specialist research has now unearthed a remarkable colour record from as early as the 1930s. For eight years the Japanese fought what they believed was a Holy War that became a fight to the death. Japan's War In Colour shows how militarism took hold of the Japanese people; describes why Japan felt compelled to attack the West; explains what drove the Japanese to resist the Allies for so long; and, finally, reveals how they dealt with the shame of defeat.

THE ARYANS is Mo Asumang's personal journey into the madness of racism during which she meets German neo-Nazis, the US leading racist, the notorious Tom Metzger and Ku Klux Klan members in the alarming twilight of the Midwest. In The ARYANS Mo questions the completely wrong interpretation of "Aryanism" - a phenomenon of the tall, blond and blue-eyed master race.

Engineer Dr Hugh Hunt revisits the little-known story of the First World War's Blitz, when the Zeppelin waged an 18-month terror campaign on the people of London.

British intelligence undertook an audacious operation to listen in on the private conversations of 10,000 German prisoners of war without their ever knowing they were being overheard. The prisoners' unguarded reminiscences and unintentional confessions have only just come to light, and prove how closely the German army were involved in the atrocities of the Holocaust. British intelligence requisitioned three stately homes for this epic task, and converted each into an elaborate trap. The 100,000 hours of conversation they captured provided crucial intelligence that changed the course of the war, and revealed some of its worst horrors, from rape to mass executions to one of the earliest bulletins from the concentration camps. But when the fighting ended, the recordings were destroyed and the transcripts locked away for half a century. Only now have they been declassified, researched and cross-referenced.

Created in the Victorian era to widen the mouth of the River Tees for shipping, South Gare is a man-made peninsula extending four kilometres into the cold North Sea. Today, the industry it was built for has gone, but the Gare remains as a haven for all sorts of unexpected communities - kite-surfers, photographers, bird-watchers, scuba-divers and the people who simply appreciate its strange, lonely beauty.

The extraordinary story of how Hollywood changed World War II – and how World War II changed Hollywood, through the interwoven experiences of five legendary filmmakers who went to war to serve their country and bring the truth to the American people: John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens. Based on Mark Harris’ best-selling book, “Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War.”

Australian filmmaker Sophia Turkiewicz investigates why her Polish mother abandoned her and uncovers the truth behind her mother's wartime escape from a Siberian gulag, leaving Sophia to confront her own capacity for forgiveness.

On the Pacific front, towards the end of World War II, Japan's imperial armed forces launched 'kamikaze' attacks - suicide missions by aircraft laden with bombs. It was a mad operation with no hope of returning alive, but the nation went wild, and the attacks continued for ten months, literally until the very last day of the war. Close to 4,000 Japanese airmen died, and nearly 7,000 Allied military personnel were killed, and thousands more were injured by the attacks. How could this happen? Utilising 15 years' worth of extensive interviews with US and Japanese World War II veterans, Takayuki Oshima’s film delves into the mechanism of how a crazed madness swept through an entire nation.

Helke Sander interviews multiple German women who were raped in Berlin by Soviet soldiers in May 1945. Most women never spoke of their experience to anyone, due largely to the shame attached to rape in German culture at that time.