The First Years

Some time after her death, film director Jill Craigie (1911- 99), re-opens an old suitcase, prompting memories of the extraordinary life and loves of this forceful, charismatic woman, whose work has been long neglected. Craigie was one of the first women to direct documentaries. Working outside the British Documentary Movement in the 1940s and early 1950s, her films such as To Be Woman (1951), on equal pay, and Out of Chaos (1944), the first film about artists at work, featuring Henry Moore and Paul Nash, tackled new subjects for the cinema through a unique blend of drama, polemic and humour. Independent Miss Craigie uses the director’s unseen papers, and her films, to reveal her energetic struggles to get her radical projects made and distributed, including her last one, on the Yugoslav conflict, made when she was 83, with her husband, former Labour leader, Michael Foot.

Documenting the rebuilding of Potsdam one year after the war under Soviet supervision.

Documentary short about the Leipzig Tradefair in 1946.

A film about Dresden - before, during, and after the war.

Michael Moore's view on how the Bush administration allegedly used the tragic events on 9/11 to push forward its agenda for unjust wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A documentary on the late American entertainer Dean Reed, who became a huge star in East Germany after settling there in 1973.

"The Voice of Innocence" is a documentary that shows how, starting in 1959, the Cuban Revolution put into practice a comprehensive and universal policy of safeguarding the rights of the child, even under the multiple difficulties resulting from the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States more than six decades ago. Cuba is one of the main signatories of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, signed on 20 November 1989, when the country had already made extraordinary progress in protecting the rights of the child, in comparison to developed countries, such as the United States, which as of today hasn't yet ratified the Convention.

In the run-up to parliamentary elections in mid-October, Polish filmmaker Marcin Wierzchowski travelled across his country to gauge the atmosphere in a society that is more divided than ever.

A squatted bank tower in downtown Caracas is transformed into a socialist micro-society by 3000 people. RUINA tells about difficulties and achievements by building up a community in a vertical city.

Torre David, a 45-story office tower in Caracas, was almost complete when it was abandoned following the death of its developer and collapse of the Venezuelan economy. Today, it is the improvised home of more than 750 families, living in an extra-legal occupation that some call a vertical slum.

Documentary about the liberation of Maastricht.

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.”

During World War II there were nearly 2,500 Allied prisoners held in Sandakan POW camp in British North Borneo. Along with the ravages of war and the struggle to survive abject conditions, only six of these POW's were found alive when the war finally ended. In the years that followed, the horror stories of human depravity and the atrocities committed by the Japanese at Sandakan POW camp would come to light, considered by many as one of the most devastating chapters of the Pacific War.

Napalm is the story of the breathtaking and brief encounter, in 1958, between a French member of the first Western European delegation officially invited to North Korea after the devastating Korean war and a nurse working for the Korean Red Cross hospital, in Pyongyang, capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The impact of Marx on the 20th century has been all-pervasive and world-wide. This program looks at the man, at the roots of his philosophy, at the causes and explanations of his philosophical development, and at its most direct outcome: the failed Soviet Union.

The free, almost naive view from the perspective of a child puts the "68ers" in a new, illuminating light in the anniversary year 2008. The film is a provocative reckoning with the ideological upbringing that seemed so progressive and yet was suffocated by the children's desire to finally grow up. With an ironic eye and a feuilletonistic style, author Richard David Precht and Cologne documentary film director André Schäfer trace a childhood in the West German provinces - and place the major events of those years in completely different, smaller and very private contexts.

"Don't Let The Bastards Grind You Down" is a documentary film about British social policy. The focus is on the political struggle against neoliberal austerity policies, which have their origins in the hated Thatcher government. The film features the former socialist MP Dave Nellist, who is now the national chair of the Trade Unionist & Socialist Coalition and Hannah Sell, the general secretary of the Socialist Party. The film features a local election campaign in the miners' town of Nuneaton, students campaigning against an increase in tuition fees and refuse workers from Birmingham striking against massive cuts to their wages.

Une ambition politique

The silent film To Regain by Work is a remarkable filmed colour portrait of the Netherlands just after World War II. Immediately after the liberation of Deventer in April 1945, Alex Roosdorp and his wife Marie Roosdorp-van den Berg began filming the devastation around them: wrecked towns, destroyed infrastructure and flooded landscapes. Roosdorp and his wife travelled hundreds of kilometres by bike to record everything. They filmed extensively in the region around Deventer, but the film also includes footage of Arnhem, Scheveningen, Walcheren and the Wieringermeer polder. The couple had an eye for the small ways in which everyday life continued in the liberated Netherlands.

A feature length, lively - montage style - documentary, capturing the essence of what life was like in socialist Hungary - dubbed the "The most cheerful barrack" back then - using contemporary music, interviews, adverts and news footages.