Hosted by actor and historian Sir Tony Robinson, this one-off special tells the powerful and moving story of five men, all members of a unique volunteer army – the Sheffield City battalion – as it recounts the soldiers’ last days, leaving their homes and loved ones to go and serve alongside their friends and neighbours, completely unaware of what lay ahead of them. Central to the programme is the story of Private Frank Meakin, who recorded his unique personal testimony of the war. Frank and his friends could never have anticipated what they would experience, but 100 years on we know in detail, thanks to his diary – an account that shouldn’t have existed, because keeping one was forbidden for servicemen on active duty on the Western Front. Frank’s diary, which was smuggled back from the Front, reveals the intimate details and dramatic stories of one battalion – and one British city – in the words of one man.
Through dramatic reconstruction and documentary asides, the spirit of Italian poet, playwright, journalist, aristocrat and army officer Gabriele D’Annunzio is captured, presenting the nascent fascism in his attempts to forge a new state in the aftermath of the First World War.
Two Australian sprinters face the brutal realities of war when they are sent to fight in the Gallipoli campaign in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
France, 1914, during World War I. On Christmas Eve, an extraordinary event takes place in the bloody no man's land that the French and the Scots dispute with the Germans…
At the start of World War I, Paul Baumer is a young German patriot, eager to fight. Indoctrinated with propaganda at school, he and his friends eagerly sign up for the army soon after graduation. But when the horrors of war soon become too much to bear, and as his friends die or become gravely wounded, Paul questions the sanity of fighting over a few hundreds yards of war-torn countryside.
When the First World War breaks out in 1914, Josef Schwejk, a naive dog dealer in Prague, joins the Imperial Army.
Hijos de África
In war-torn colonial America, in the midst of a bloody battle between British, the French and Native American allies, the aristocratic daughter of a British Colonel and her party are captured by a group of Huron warriors. Fortunately, a group of three Mohican trappers comes to their rescue.
A young British officer resigns his post when he learns of his regiment's plan to ship out to the Sudan for the conflict with the Mahdi. His friends and fiancée send him four white feathers as symbols of what they view as his cowardice. To redeem his honor, he disguises himself as an Arab and secretly saves their lives.
The events in Sarajevo in June 1914 are the backdrop for a thriller directed by Andreas Prochaska and written by Martin Ambrosch, focusing on the examining magistrate Dr. Leo Pfeffer (Florian Teichtmeister) investigating the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Trying to do his job in a time of lawlessness and violence, intrigues and betrayal, Leo struggles to maintain his integrity and save his love, Marija, and her father, prominent Serbian merchant. But the events of Sarajevo have set into motion an inescapable course of events that will escalate to become … the Great War.
Manuel Horrillo has visited for 7 years the fields where the clashes between the Spanish troops and the rebels of the protectorate took place during the so-called Rif War, a forgotten war of the Spanish collective imaginary.
The Salient
The adventures of the Lafayette Escadrille, young Americans who volunteered for the French military before the U.S. entered World War I, and became the country's first fighter pilots.
Imposed under the British colonial rule in 1860, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code criminalise any sexual acts between consenting adults of the same sex, stigmatising them as 'against the order of nature'. On July 2, 2009 the Delhi High Court passed a landmark judgment scrapping this clause, thus fulfilling the most basic demand of the Indian LGBTQ community, which had been fighting this law for the past 10 years. Three characters, Beena, Pallav and Abheena travel through the city of Bombay heading to the celebrations for the first anniversary of the historic verdict. '365 without 377' is the story of their journey towards freedom.
France, World War I. Justin (Alban Ivanov), an illiterate peasant farmer is enrolled in French army. Knowing nothing of the World or the War, Justin finds himself on the front without understanding why he must kill men he’s never met. Naïve and open minded, Justin will cross the path of a German pilot and a Senegalese soldier, escape a prisoner camp and start a mutiny to prevent his fellow comrades to risk their lives. Through his journey Justin will question the absurdity of war, make lifetime friends and inspire many…
After his family was brutally murdered by French settlers on his wedding day, an Algerian man joins the French army and is sent to Vietnam to fight in the First Indochina War.
The film focuses on the leadership of the Great Powers of Europe in the days leading up to the outbreak of the First World War.
Working from archives of private film footage from a trip to India by the upper class of the late 1920s, a period of strong anti-colonial outbreak, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi deconstruct the images and analyze the attitude and behavior of Westerners in the East.
In 1911, a willful and determined man from peasant stock named Charles Saganne enlists in the military and is assigned to the Sahara Desert under the aristocratic Colonel Dubreuilh.
Five American soldiers fighting in Europe during World War II struggle to return to Allied territory after being separated from U.S. forces during the historic Malmedy Massacre.