Ukraine: Holocaust Ground Zero (2023)

German Concentration Camps Factual Survey

On the 29th September 1945, the incomplete rough cut of a brilliant documentary about concentration camps was viewed at the MOI in London. For five months, Sidney Bernstein had led a small team – which included Stewart McAllister, Richard Crossman and Alfred Hitchcock – to complete the film from hours of shocking footage. Unfortunately, this ambitious Allied project to create a feature-length visual report that would damn the Nazi regime and shame the German people into acceptance of Allied occupation had missed its moment. Even in its incomplete form (available since 1984) the film was immensely powerful, generating an awed hush among audiences. But now, complete to six reels, this faithfully restored and definitive version produced by IWM, is being compared with Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955).

Avenging Evil

In 1946, just after the end of World War II, a secret organization of Holocaust survivors plans a terrible revenge: since the Nazis have killed millions of Jews, they will kill millions of Germans.

The Blitzed Cities of Bristol and Bath

Vivid colour footage of the wartime devastation wreaked on Bristol and Bath - and the barely affected village of Chew Magna.

In the back of history - The lost villages of Masuria

In September of 2017 German writer and director Daniel Raboldt accompanied a group of German and Polish scientists and students into the woods of Masuria, Poland. The expedition aimed to find traces of the so-called "lost villages", left by the Masurians around 1945 by the end of the Second World War. Today only some of the old graveyards can be found deep in the woods of the beautiful Masurian landscape. The documentary "In the back of history - The lost villages of Masuria" shows the students at their work in the historic archives and in the woods. How conclusive can this kind of historic research be? How much can we really learn by looking through old files or other sources? And what can we learn from the vanishing of the Masurians? Do we face similar problems today? The film dives deep into themes like the rise of nationalism and identity and uncovers the tragic end of a population that was asked one simple question in the early 20th century: Stay or Leave?

De Gaulle, histoire d'un géant

50 years after the death of General De Gaulle, this film retraces his life, from his birth in 1890 to his burial at Colombey-Les-Deux-Eglises in 1970.

The Blue Hills

A documentary on the volunteer Estonian Army's defense against the Soviet Army in 1944 with an emphasis on its last stand in the region known as the Blue Hills of Estonia.

V.J. Day Celebrations

Soon after the VE Day celebrations, there is a second chance to let the hair down, and these dancers make the most of it with much humour.

Radical Evil

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.

Two Forces

Docudrama about the Soviet occupation of a Finnish village in the fall before the Winter War.

Omoiyari

Violinist and songwriter Kishi Bashi travels on a musical journey to understand WWII era Japanese Incarceration, assimilation, and what it means to be a minority in America today.

Oorlog in Westerbork

The film shows the period just after the liberation of camp Westerbork and the Netherlands. The remaining Jews were ordered to guard new prisoners: NSB members and other collaborators. Several of those 'wrong' Dutchmen had been partly responsible for the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. This documentary is about those first four months in camp Westerbork, when almost a hundred prisoners suspected of collaboration died.

In Love with Adolf Hitler

This film captures the affair, full of love, lust, and despair, between Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, from 1932 until their double suicide in 1945.

The Identity ES

Emil Skamene has written more than 250 scientific publications, won dozens of distinguished awards, and was even on the verge of winning the Nobel Prize. He is the founder of the Institute for Clinical Research at McGill University in Montreal, a member of the Czech Learned Society, and a Knight of the National Order of Quebec. Not so long ago, he discovered that he was someone completely different – he had devoted his whole life to unlocking the secrets of genes, and yet he had been unaware of his own identity for decades. His life was a history that changed the whole of Europe and the world. His story is full of unbelievable and completely absurd situations that can only happen in real life.

Syndrome K

Syndrome K is the true story about a highly contagious, highly fictitious disease created by three Roman Catholic doctors during the holocaust to hide Jews in a Vatican-affiliated hospital.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Him

What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)

Le Petit Vingtième : le siècle de Tintin

From the beginning, Hergé's work, Tintin's creator, was conditioned by the ideology of his publisher, the weekly child supplement of a Belgian Catholic newspaper. An exciting analysis of the political meaning of the adventures of Tintin.

The Wannsee Conference: The Documentary

It was arguably the deadliest conference in human history. The topic: plans to murder 11 million Jews in Europe. The participants were not psychopaths, but educated men from the SS, police, administration and ministries. The invitation to the meeting at Wannsee came from Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office. The Wehrmacht's campaigns of conquest in Eastern Europe marked the beginning of the systematic murder of Jews in Poland and the Soviet Union. In mid-September 1941, Hitler made the decision to deport all Jews from Germany to the East. Although there had been transports before, Hitler's order represented a further escalation in the murderous decision-making process. Persecution and discrimination had been part of everyday life since 1933. But as a result, the living conditions for the Jews in the Third Reich became even more difficult, among them the Berlin Jew Margot Friedländer, born in 1921, and the Chotzen family.

Nazi Death Marches

Faced with the relentless and unstoppable advance of the Soviet Red Army, from the spring of 1944 until the capitulation of the Third Reich in May 1945, the Nazis evacuated the labor, concentration and extermination camps, factories of pain and death which, during years of nightmare, they had established in the occupied eastern territories. Forced to travel enormous distances, thousands of people died along the way from hunger, thirst and exhaustion.

The City and the City

Six chapters describe the lives and perils of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community which was almost entirely exterminated by the Nazis in 1943. Past and present become an echo chamber in which the viewer experiences, aghast, the madness of humanity.

They Saw Japan at War

The story of a Franco-Belgian family living in Japan from 1927 to 1947, a time of prosperity and fortune, but also of political turbulence and war.

Austerlitz

The new film from Sergei Loznitsa (Maidan, The Event) is a stark yet rich and complex portrait of tourists visiting the grounds of former Nazi extermination camps, and a sometimes sardonic study of the relationship (or the clash) between contemporary culture and the sanctity of the site.

Wars Don't End

During World War II, 12 000 children were born to Norwegian mothers and German soldiers. In WARS DON’T END five of these children tell their stories about lives of discrimination and abuse stemming from the choices of their mothers and the actions of their fathers.

Memories of a World War II Hero: Captain Brown's Story

Tells the story of probably the world's greatest pilot through an extensive and in-depth interview: Capt Eric "Winkle" Brown CBE, DSC, AFC. From his flight with WW1 German fighter ace Ernst Udet in 1936 through to commanding a squadron of Buccaneers at the height of the Cold War, we hear how "Winkle" Brown experienced the rise and fall of Nazism; how he flew the most dangerous, uncontrollable aircraft, how he cheated death countless times.

The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life

The story of Alice Herz-Sommer, a German-speaking Jewish pianist from Prague who was, at her death, the world's oldest Holocaust survivor. She discusses the importance of music, laughter, and how to have an optimistic outlook on life.

The Last Survivors

Documentary compiling the testimonies of the last remaining Holocaust survivors living in Britain, all of whom were children at the time, and following them over the course of a year as they embark upon personal and profound journeys.

Algeria 1943: A Colony Under Vichy Control

World War II, June 1940. France has fallen and suffers the relentless boot of Nazi Germany. But Algeria, the prized French colony in North Africa, remains part of the territory controlled by the Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain. A strict colonial order is maintained: the French of European origin rule, while local Jews are stripped of French citizenship and discrimination against the mainly Muslim population increases.

The Waters of the Bug River

Dedicated to the poet Paul Celan, the film traces the itinerary of the deportation of Jews from Czernowitz and Bucovina to Mikhailovka camp on the banks of the river Bug during WW2. Among them was the poet’s mother.

John Ford: The Man Who Invented America

Over a 50-year career and more than a hundred movies, filmmaker John Ford (1894-1973) forged the legend of the Far West. By giving a face to the underprivileged, from humble cowboys to persecuted minorities, he revealed like no one else the great social divisions that existed and still exist in the United States. More than four decades after his death, what remains of his legacy and humanistic values in the memory of those who love his work?

Undermining the Nazis: Paris' Secret Tunnels

Two men show extraordinary courage by secretly mapping Paris' underground during the 1940 German occupation.