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.
The lifelong friendship between Rafe McCawley and Danny Walker is put to the ultimate test when the two ace fighter pilots become entangled in a love triangle with beautiful Naval nurse Evelyn Johnson. But the rivalry between the friends-turned-foes is immediately put on hold when they find themselves at the center of Japan's devastating attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.
A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.
In the years before World War II, a penniless Japanese child is torn from her family to work as a maid in a geisha house.
1943. They have never stepped foot on French soil but because France was at war, Said, Abdelkader, Messaoud and Yassir enlist in the French Army, along with 130,000 other “indigenous” soldiers, to liberate the “fatherland” from the Nazi enemy. Heroes that history has forgotten…
The epic and poetic tale of the early years of Italian cinema, from 1896 to 1930: how peplum was born, how the first stars shone, how many daring filmmakers were able to create an original style amalgamating literature, theater, painting and opera; a tale of splendor and decadence.
Hélène Berr, une jeune fille dans Paris occupé
This documentary follows the French soccer team on their way to victory in the 1998 World Cup in France. Stéphane Meunier spent the whole time filming the players, the coach and some other important characters of this victory, giving us a very intimate and nice view of them, as if we were with them.
Scenes from holiday life at Lake Balaton in Hungary during the communism.
The chronic shortage of housing in Central Havana has pushed the city upwards, where life spills out onto the rooftops. Resilient and remarkable, these rooftop dwellers have a privileged point of view on a society in the process of major transformation.
Thirty-six years after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in Soviet Ukraine, newly uncovered archival footage and recorded interviews with those who were present paint an emotional and gripping portrait of the extent and gravity of the disaster and the lengths to which the Soviet government went to cover up the incident, including the soldiers sent in to “liquidate” the damage. Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes is the full, unvarnished true story of what happened in one of the least understood tragedies of the twentieth century.
In 1945, at the end of World War II, Neus Català returns to France, where she recalls her life under the Nazi yoke.
After World War II, 4,000 Polish families came to Australia. They were Jews, Fascists, anti-Communists, and others dispossessed. In a large hostel, where even married men and women were housed in separate barracks, the adults lived for two years while they worked off the government's payment of their passage. Even though he is married to Anna and has a son, Julian falls in love with Nina and she with him. As they and others face the new situations and prejudices that await immigrants and as they take on aspects of Australian culture, old-country values reassert themselves. Julian decides what to do about love and family, and Nina must find a way to move on.
In the North African desert in World War II, a crippled American fighter plane that is unable to take off tries to evade and destroy a pursuing Nazi tank.
When a folk high school is turned into an internment camp for German refugees, the headmaster couple Jakob and Lis and their children are thrust into an impossible situation. Should the family help the refugees — or stand firm in the Danish resistance against the Germans?
Das radikal Böse is a German-Austrian documentary that attempted to explore psychological processes and individual decision latitude "normal young men" in the German Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD, which in 1941 during the Second World War as part of the Holocaust two million Jewish civilians shot dead in Eastern Europe.
Richthofen goes off to war like thousands of other men. As fighter pilots, they become cult heroes for the soldiers on the battlefields. Marked by sportsmanlike conduct, technical exactitude and knightly propriety, they have their own code of honour. Before long he begins to understand that his hero status is deceptive. His love for Kate, a nurse, opens his eyes to the brutality of war.
A remarkable film that takes a special look at the first war to be truly reported and recorded by one of the more unsung heroes of World War II: the combat photographer. Through the unflinching eye of their camera's lenses, these courageous soldiers continually risked their lives in their brave attempts to capture history.
Mains basses sur les savants d'Hitler, le plan secret français