From an ominous Lecturer, a small 1930s middle American community learns of the Harper Affair, in which young Jimmy Harper finds his life of promise turn into a life of debauchery and murder thanks to the new drug menace marijuana. Along the way, he receives help from his girlfriend Mary and Jesus Himself, but always finds himself in the arms of the Reefer Man and the rest of the denizens of the Reefer Den.
A shy and quiet World War II evacuee is housed by a disgruntled old man, and they soon develop a close bond.
A dramatization of the relationship between heart surgery pioneers Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas.
The story of the rape of Nanking, one of the most tragic events in history. In 1937, the invading Japanese army murdered over 200,000 and raped tens of thousands of Chinese. In the midst of this horror, a small group of Western expatriates banded together to save 250,000. Nanking shows the tremendous impact individuals can make on the course of history.
Madrid, Spain, early thirties. The charming playboy Sergio Hernán is an unscrupulous womanizer who over the years has seduced and abandoned hundreds of women with the complicity of Oshidori, his cynical butler. However, his brief encounter with Elena Fortún, blonde, posh and a bit cheesy, unexpectedly leaves an indelible mark on his soul.
Summer 1936 - The Berlin Olympics, organized by the Nazi regime on the eve of World War II, acted as a grand showcase for a Germany that was athletic, peaceful and rejuvenated. The violence and hate that until then had reigned in the streets of Berlin suddenly vanished. Adolf Hitler became the triumphant host of European countries he would soon try to invade or face in a deadly global conflict.
To historians, physicist Lise Meitner deserves to be placed on a par with Einstein, Heisenberg and Otto Hahn. In the 1930s on the verge of World War II, she led a small group of scientists who discovered that splitting the atomic nucleus of uranium releases enormous energy. This extraordinary film tells the story of a woman who was far ahead of her time as a scientist and a pioneer of feminism.
There's not a person in the world who wouldn't recognize Mickey Mouse. But until now, not many knew the man who originally gave shape, movement and personality to the world's most beloved icon. "The Hand Behind the Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story" takes you behind the scenes to meet Walt Disney's best friend and chief animator.
The Walton family is excited to learn that John Sr. will be coming home for Christmas during the winter of 1933. However, when a storm threatens his arrival and he's nowhere to be found, John Boy embarks on a life-changing journey to find him.
Between 1931 and 1933, 4 million Ukrainians were to die of hunger. This famine was not preceded by any cataclysmic weather event, nor by a war. This was an ideological crime: decided by Stalin and approved by the Politburo, with the aim of punishing Ukrainian peasants who refused the collectivization of the countryside, cultivated a strong form of nationalism and showed resistance to communist ideology. Drawing on previously unpublished material, on many Soviet films and on a number of particular points of view, including that of Welsh journalist and whistleblower Gareth Jones, this film retraces the story of that famine.
An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time.
After his father is murdered by the Nazis in 1938, a young Viennese Jew named Ferry Tobler flees to Prague, where he joins forces with another expatriate and a sympathetic Czech relief worker. Together with other Jewish refugees, the three make their way to Paris, and, after spending time in a French prison camp, eventually escape to Marseille, from where they hope to sail to a safe port.
Story of the life of Quentin Crisp, an Englishman who was brave enough to live his life according to his own style even in the hostile days of WW2.
In the 1930’s, the workers of the underground, headed by brigades of writers, are in charge to write in real time "the history of the Moscow Metro". Based on their narratives, partially unpublished, the film recounts the first lines construction of the most beautifiul underground in the world, in the light of this "big literary Utopia", stoped by the purges of 1937-38.
A Hollywood writer becomes embroiled while investigating into the lives of five fictitious actresses all nominated for the Academy Award for best actress.
North Sudan, summer 1923. King Alfonso XIII of Spain captures an enormous African elephant, an apparently irrelevant act that, however, will be paramount to understand the Spain of 20th century; an animal from far lands that will become a symbol of the Second Spanish Republic, the communist movement and many other things; a royal hunting that marks the beginning of a bizarre story of jealousy, passion, political intrigues and taxidermy.
The story of Italian cinema under Fascism, a sophisticated film industry built around the founding of the Cinecittà studios and the successful birth of a domestic star system, populated by very peculiar artists among whom stood out several beautiful, magnetic, special actresses; a dark story of war, drugs, sex, censorship and tragedy.
Explores Leni Riefenstahl's artistic legacy and her complex ties to the Nazi regime, juxtaposing her self-portrayal with evidence suggesting awareness of the regime's atrocities.
A television production based on Bozena Slančíková-Timrava's short stories about social and moral conditions in a Slovak village in the 1930s.
Riding the Rails offers a visionary perspective on the presumed romanticism of the road and cautionary legacy of the Great Depression. The filmmakers relay the experiences and painful recollections of these now-elderly survivors of the rails. Forced to travel more by economic necessity than the spirit of adventure, the film's subjects dispel romantic myths of a hobo existence and its corresponding veneer of freedom. Riding the Rails recounts the hoboes' trade secrets for survival and accounts of dank miseries, loneliness, imprisonment, death, and dispossession. Sixty years later, the filmmakers transport their subjects back to the tracks, where the surging impact of sound and movement resuscitates memories of a shattered adolescence and devastating rite of passage.