When the world was on fire, they called Hans Blix. This is how the Swedish diplomat is introduced in ‘Blix Not Bombs’. And if there is one fire he is particularly associated with, it is the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Prior to the invasion, Blix led the delegation of UN officials to find out whether weapons of mass destruction were present in Iraq. And it is the invasion and its consequences that we get Blix’s formidably insightful analysis of in a thorough and honest conversation with director Greta Stocklassa. Few others understand the complexities of international politics on the world stage like Blix, and none can explain it with his intellectual elegance. But Stocklassa’s film is also a portrait of the man himself, now an elderly gentleman, writing his memoirs, walking with a cane and watching birds through the window of his apartment. His outlook and commitment is as urgent as ever, as Blix takes stock of the invasion of Iraq and the state of the world today.
Les dieux de Molenbeek
In February 1939, more than 20,000 Americans filled Madison Square Garden for an event billed as a “Pro-American Rally.” Images of George Washington hung next to swastikas and speakers railed against the “Jewish controlled media” and called for a return to a racially “pure” America. The keynote speaker was Fritz Kuhn, head of the German American Bund. Nazi Town, USA tells the largely unknown story of the Bund, which had scores of chapters in suburbs and big cities across the country and represented what many believe was a real threat of fascist subversion in the United States. The Bund held joint rallies with the Ku Klux Klan and ran dozens of summer camps for children centered around Nazi ideology and imagery. Its melding of patriotic values with virulent anti-Semitism raised thorny issues that we continue to wrestle with today.
Richard Overton, at 109 years old, is the oldest living WWII veteran. He lives alone, still drives, and has a 91 year old girlfriend named Ms. Love. In this snapshot of his daily life, we learn something about what life is like at 109 years. As he says, 'I may give out, but I'll never give up.'
An epic family saga told by the women around the famous architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
An extraordinary journey into the past to that fateful day, June 6, 1944. Relive the event of D-Day on the beaches of Normandy with Company Sergeant-Major Charlie Martin of the Queen's Own Rifles. Experience an emotional and intensely personal account of D-Day through a combination of interviews, archival film and Charlie Martin's diary excerpts.
The director’s mother, Mirka Mora, avoided Auschwitz by one day. On his father’s side many perished in the Holocaust. These facts triggered three visits to Auschwitz by Mora from 2010 to 2014 in an effort to understand and remember.
De Gaulle, le géant aux pieds d'argile
During the Second World War, to give himself every chance of winning the conflict, Adolf Hitler instructed the most brilliant German scientists to develop advanced technology weapons of mass destruction. Among them were the V1, the first cruise missile, and the V2, the first ballistic missile. The document looks back at the context in which their creators worked and succeeded in designing innovations that laid the foundations of modern aviation and aerospace.
'Veterans', focuses on WW2 veterans, once fighters in the Red Army and now uprooted immigrants, fighting for their place in society. These people, who experienced the twentieth century's bloodiest war as Soviet soldiers, immigrated to Israel after the collapse of the Soviet Union and found themselves in a society that is totally indifferent to their glorious past. The film offers a close and compassionate look at the veterans' lives, fueled by complexity, pain, and an almost silent insult, alongside joy and self-deprecating humor. The feeling of living on borrowed time drives the veterans to embark on what may be their last adventure.
Interview with Jarl Kulle cut together with a summary of his career.
Après la guerre, les restitutions
It was one of the great crimes of the Second World War: from 1941 to 1944, a total of 872 days, the siege and starvation of Leningrad by the German Wehrmacht on Hitler's orders lasted. Over a million people fell victim to the blockade, most of them dying of hunger. Countless of these starving people wrote diaries with the last of their strength, and cameramen filmed in the paralyzed city. Evidence from the hell of the siege, many of the film recordings, but above all the written memories on which this documentary on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation is based, remained under lock and key after the war. The voices of those who had suffered through this terrible time should not be heard by anyone, because they did not fit the pathos of the Leningrad heroic song that was officially sung. Most of the recordings come from women. The writers feared neither the enemy nor the Communist Party or Stalin, who often proved incompetent in providing for the population.
Le IIIe Reich n'aura pas la bombe
From the search to find the appropriate landing site, the planning of the landing, its execution and aftermath, this is the complete story.
Located nearly 80 kilometres north of Berlin, Germany, the former municipality of Ravensbrück was home to a prison between 1939 and 1945 that became a concentration camp designed specifically for women. It was built by order of Heinreich Himmler, a high dignitary of the Third Reich and head of the SS. Of the more than 130,000 people who were deported there, almost 90,000 never returned. Based on witnesses, international experts and computer-generated images, the document reveals the atrocities committed in Ravensbrück.
The gripping story of Britain's most extraordinary double agent; Eddie Chapman. Chapman duped the Germans so successfully he was awarded their highest honour, the Iron Cross, the only UK citizen ever to have received one.
A depiction of the last living generation of German participants in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.
A propaganda film about the struggle of the Slovak army on the eastern front in 1941 and 1942.
A historical account of military policy regarding homosexuality during World War II. The documentary includes interviews with several homosexual WWII veterans.