Oskar Matzerath is a very unusual boy. Refusing to leave the womb until promised a tin drum by his mother, Agnes, Oskar is reluctant to enter a world he sees as filled with hypocrisy and injustice, and vows on his third birthday to never grow up. Miraculously, he gets his wish. As the Nazis rise to power in Danzig, Oskar wills himself to remain a child, beating his tin drum incessantly and screaming in protest at the chaos surrounding him.
Filmed live from the 1993 revival, Sam Mendes' directorial debut takes place at the Donmar Warehouse in London's West End. Jane Horrocks stars as cabaret girl Sally Bowles, Adam Godley as the bicurious Cliff, and Alan Cumming as the eccentric Emcee. Inside the Kit Kat Club of 1931 Berlin, starry-eyed singer Sally and the impish Emcee sound the clarion call to decadent fun, while outside, a notorious political party grows into a brutal force.
By combining actual footage with reenactments, this film offers both a documentary and fictional account of the life of Adolf Hitler, from his childhood in Vienna, through the rise of the Third Reich, to his final act of suicide in the waning days of WWII. The film also provides considerable, and often shocking, detail of the atrocities enacted by the Nazi regime under Hitler's command.
During World War II, spy Wu Lai-sheung is instructed by her superior Fan Yeung-shan to murder spy number 13 Cheung Chi-ping. While Wu establishes a relationship with Sakei, the assistant general of the Japanese army, she also gets acquainted with Cheung. Cheung and Wu fall in love. Wu recommends Cheung to become Sakei's driver. Cheung pretends to court the Japanese spy Siu-kuen, but Siu-kuen arranges to kill the spies contacting with him. Cheung has seen through Kuen's identity for long. When Kuen is going to kill Wu, Cheung kills Kuen, Fan compels Wu to kill Cheung. Wu follows the instruction to murder Cheung. After the murder, Wu disappears. After the war, Fan discovers Wu ends up in asylum. When he visits Wu, he tells her of Cheung's innocence. This breaks Wu's heart. Cheung turns out to have seen through Wu's identity for a long time and pretended to have been killed to cover up his identity and facilitate his work. With the truth known and the war ended, Cheung and Wu married.
A true-story account of a German businessman who saved more than 200,000 Chinese during the Nanjing massacre in 1937-38.
In 1930s fascist Italy, adolescent Luca just lost his mother. His father, a callous businessman, sends him to be taken care of by British expatriate Mary Wallace. Mary and her cultured friends - including artist Arabella, young widow Elsa, and archaeologist Georgie - keep a watchful eye over the boy. But the women's cultivated lives take a dramatic turn when Allied forces declare war on Mussolini.
About young British journalist, George Hogg, who with the assistance of a courageous Australian nurse, saves a group of orphaned children during the Japanese occupation of China in 1937.
During the brutal invasion of China in 1937 by Imperial Japanese forces, tens of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war are murdered and women raped in what is known simply as "The Rape of Nanking." This docudrama is a stirring account of a small band of courageous American missionaries who choose to stay in Nanking to try and protect a quarter million vulnerable Chinese civilians who are trapped in a city ruled by a savage, out of control army. Their stories are brought vividly to life through actual real-time letters and diaries as they bear witness to one of the worst wartime atrocities in history.
Set between the two World Wars and based on true historical events, Bitter Harvest conveys the untold story of the Holodomor, the genocidal famine engineered by the tyrant Joseph Stalin. The film displays a powerful tale of love, honour, rebellion and survival at a time when Ukraine was forced to adjust to the horrifying territorial ambitions of the burgeoning Soviet Union.
Spain in the 1930s is the place to be for a man of action like Robert Jordan. There is a civil war going on and Jordan—who has joined up on the side that appeals most to idealists of that era—has been given a high-risk assignment up in the mountains. He awaits the right time to blow up a crucial bridge in order to halt the enemy's progress.
A small town defends itself from the Japanese by use of a network of tunnels during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
In 1937, during the height of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Imperial Japanese Army has just captured Nanjing, then-capital of the Republic of China. What followed was known as the Nanking Massacre, or the Rape of Nanking, a six week period wherein tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed.
Professor Lo Yeung-guo (Hou Yao) and his students escape death from the Japanese army, and call on villagers in the countryside to form a guerrillas group. His son Lo Yung (Lau Hark-suen), however, indulges in debauchery. Entrapped by the Japanese, chicken-hearted Yung leaks information about the guerrilla that leads to deaths and injuries in the group. Yeung-guo reprimands his son for being an invisible traitor, inflicting even more harm than an outright traitor. Placing righteousness before family, he decides to execute his own son. As a writer-director-actor in the film, Hou Yao proclaimed his unwavering stance on resistance on the screen, and delivered a scathing attack on the cowardly ‘invisible traitors‘ at that time. Not long after, Hou was sadly arrested and executed by the Japanese army in Singapore.
A mysterious tale set around a traditional British family on the eve of World War Two. Oblivious to the looming shadow of World War II, the wealthy Keyes maintain a confident façade in the British countryside until daughter Anne becomes an unexpected pawn. Her accidental discovery of secret recordings creates a rift in the family.
All her life, Englishwoman Gladys Aylward knew that China was the place where she belonged. Not qualified to be sent there as a missionary, Gladys works as a domestic to earn the money to send herself to a poor, remote village. There she eventually lives a full and happy life: running the inn, acting as "foot inspector", advising the local Mandarin, and even winning the heart of mixed race Captain Lin Nan. But Gladys discovers her real destiny when the country is invaded by Japan and the Chinese children need her to save their lives. Based on a true story.
Volunteering as a "comfort woman" on the Manchurian front, where she is expected to service hundreds of soldiers, Harumi is commandeered by the brutal Lieutenant Narita but falls for the sensitive Mikami, Narita's direct subordinate. Seijun Suzuki's Story of a Prostitute is a tragic love story as well as a rule-bending take on a popular Taijiro Tamura novel, challenging military and fraternal codes of honor, as seen through Harumi's eyes.
Salamanca, Spain, 1936. In the early days of the military rebellion that began the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), writer Miguel de Unamuno supports the uprising in the hope that the prevailing political chaos will end. But when the confrontation becomes bloody, Unamuno must question his initial position.
A young refugee travels from Russia to America in search of her lost father and falls in love with a gypsy horseman.
In an Arctic village in 1931, British mapmaker Walter Russell selects 12-year-old Eskimo Avik as his guide. When the boy contracts tuberculosis, Walter flies him to a Montreal hospital, where Avik meets Albertine and is infatuated. A decade later, a grown Avik encounters Albertine again in London, where he's serving as a British combat pilot. Despite her relationship with Walter, she and Avik begin an affair.
Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre depicts the brutal events behind the Nanking Massacre committed by the Imperial Japanese army against the Chinese people during the Second Sino-Japanese War.