Red and Black

Sanda spends all her time working in a plastic factory, raising her two small children and catering to an indifferent husband, leaving little room for herself. A chance encounter with another man may offer her an escape from her daily chores.

Elena Stoica, a resident doctor at a hospital, faces a silent enemy: tuberculosis. With the healthcare system in ruins and no real hope for treatment, Elena devises a dangerous lie, a fictitious trip to a medical congress in Paris.

Polish socialist and Marxist Rosa Luxemburg works tirelessly in the service of revolution in early 20th century Poland and Germany. While Luxemburg campaigns for her beliefs, she is repeatedly imprisoned as she forms the Spartacist League offering a new vision for Germany.

Èxode, de la batalla a la frontera

A rare documentary that shows how Soviet war propaganda presented the events of the Finnish front in 1941–1944. The main emphasis is on the resolution of the war. The film contains plenty of unique footage of the final stages of the Continuation War.

Peaceful citizens (one of whom resembles Felix the Cat) are dancing to music before their island is being invaded by a gigantic rodent that resembles Mickey Mouse. The islanders contact legendary folk-hero Momotaro from a giant book to battle Mickey.

Spain, 1938, during the Spanish Civil War. Carol, a 12-year-old Spanish-American girl, arrives in her mother's hometown and transforms the secretive family environment. Her innocence and rebellious nature drive her at first to reject a world that is at once foreign and completely new.

The Sailor and the Seagull was released by the U.S. Navy in 1949 with a simple goal: encouraging servicemen to re-enlist. In the film, a disgruntled sailor named McGinty complains about the raw deal he believes he is receiving by serving in the Navy. As luck would have it, a seagull comes to release him from service so that he can experience the freedom of civilian life. McGinty soon learns, however, that civilian life means less freedom and less money than he had imagined and quickly jumps at the chance to re-enlist. (cont. http://blogs.archives.gov/unwritten-record/2013/09/26/sailor-and-the-seagull/)

In the harsh post-war years' Catalan countryside, Andreu, a child that belongs to the losing side, finds the corpses of a man and his son in the forest. The authorities want his father to be made responsible of the deaths, but Andreu tries to help his father by finding out who truly killed them. In this search, Andreu develops a moral consciousness against a world of adults fed by lies. In order to survive, he betrays his own roots and ends up finding out the monster that lives within him.

Comprised of footage shot during the Nazi regime, including propaganda, newsreels, broadcasts and even some of Eva Braun's colorized personal home movies, we explore the way in which the Third Reich infiltrated the lives of the German population, from 1933 to 1945.

In the spring of 1945 the war is still going on, but in Bulgaria the communists have already seized the power. The new rulers do justice according to their personal interests. This is the beginning of the era of Communism in Bulgaria - spiritual poverty, expropriation, destroying of the intelligentsia. In this chaos the main character, an actress fallen on hard times, wants to preserve her social status with every available means. She claims to be a Communist activist and, in order to gain access to the theater even shows a photo with the Bulgarian communist revolutionary Georgi Dimitrov's dog However, in order to survive, she has to resort to betrayal.

Between 1933 and 1945 roughly 1200 films were made in Germany, of which 300 were banned by the Allied forces. Today, around 40 films, called "Vorbehaltsfilme", are locked away from the public with an uncertain future. Should they be re-released, destroyed, or continue to be neglected? Verbotene Filme takes a closer look at some of these forbidden films.

Pre-WWII Czech democratic politician Milada Horáková was one of the first victims of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Opposing the 1948 coup but not leaving the country, she was arrested and tried for treason on fabricated charges in a show trial broadcast on the radio.

On March 9, 2026, two American filmmakers disappeared in Romania while attending a horror festival. On May 14, journalists began receiving footage of the missing women from an anonymous source. This film presents the raw, unedited version.

At the end of the Spanish Civil War, the members of a group of vaudeville performers have been stripped of everything: all they have left is hunger and the instinct to survive. Day after day, agonizingly, lost and helpless between the victors and the vanquished, the musician Jorge, the ventriloquist Enrique, the couplet singer Rocío and the orphan Miguel search tirelessly for something to eat and a safe place to live.

In the fall of 1948, shortly before the end of the civil war in Greece, six young leftists traveled to Athens, boarded a plane to Thessaloniki, and forced the pilot to fly them to neighboring Yugoslavia, where they would seek political asylum along with other comrades. Their plan went off without a hitch and went down in history as the first hijacking ever.

When the Soviet Army marched into Romania in 1944, a part of the Romanian population went “into the mountains” – a diverse assortment of nationalists and fascists, liberals, apolitical farmers and members of the middle-class, who were affected by the Communists’ expropriations. Over a thousand armed resistance groups took refuge in the inaccessible forests of the Carpathian Mountains where they waited in vain for the support of the Western Allies. One of them was led by Ion Gavrilă-Ogoranu, who managed to remain undetected until 1976 when he was arrested. This film depicts the daily existence of this group. It tells the story of a struggle that became an end in itself, as the enemy was constantly in pursuit and arrest meant torture and often liquidation. Hungry and emotionally withdrawn, the group of young men got entangled in a partisan war that could not be won, lost in the landscape of the South Carpathians, accompanied by a vigilant secret police, the Securitate.

Sunshine, an idyllic and almost forgotten island under British rule, is shortly to become independent. But a few days before this event is to take place, the British governor of the island is shot. Her Majesty's secret service is called in and Sam McCready asks Desmond Hannah of Scotland Yard to take charge of the case.

Pedoni

May 1945, Ljubljana. Following the end of World War II and the communist seizure of power, many opponents of communism flee Yugoslavia, retreating to Austrian Carinthia toward the British Allies. On a medical train from Ljubljana, alongside wounded members of the Home Guard, travel two physicians: Dr. Janez Janež and Dr. Valentin Meršol with his family. Their principles and consciences are put to the test as they face the brutal truth that they cannot save everyone - the survival of some will mean the death of others.