Project X (1949)

Ernst Thälmann – Son of the Working Class

This film is the first of a two-part historical and biographical portrait of the communist politician and anti-fascist Ernst Thälmann. In early November 1918, Ernst Thälmann is an unwilling soldier serving on the western front. As the revolutionary movement at home is threatened by the betrayal of the Social Democrats and fissures in the working class, Thälmann calls on his fellow soldiers to put down their weapons and unite with the workers in the communist struggle at home. Thälmann’s qualms about which side he is fighting on continue, but when the local police attempt to prevent a shipment of provisions and supplies from reaching the people in Petrograd, he intervenes and the ship is unloaded. With this moment of clarity, Thälmann continues to follow his political convictions and joins the workers at the Hamburg uprising in October 1923.

Ernst Thälmann – Leader of the Working Class

This film is the second of a two-part historical and biographical portrait of the communist politician and anti-fascist Ernst Thälmann. Autumn, 1918: Somewhere on Germany’s western front, Ernst Thälmann, age twenty-four, is calling on his fellow soldiers to put down their guns and join him in the communist struggle at home. When Hamburg’s Police Commissioner blocks a much-needed food shipment to the workers of Petrograd, Ernst battles to see it allowed through. Until his murder on August 18, 1944, Ernst remained true to his political convictions in the face of many setbacks.

The East Is Red

Pre-Cultural Revolution propaganda at its most lavish, this model opera depicts the history and evolution of the Communist Party of China under Mao Zedong from its founding in July 1921 to the establishment of "New China" in 1949. Detailed in the musical are several key events in CPC history such as the Northern Expedition, the KMT-led Shanghai massacre of 1927, the Nanchang Uprising and formation of the People's Liberation Army, the Long March and the founding of the PRC on October 1, 1949.

Sofia

A former OSS agent is assigned to rescue two atomic scientists from the dastardly Russians and spirit them away from behind the Iron Curtain.

The Country Left Behind

Before the Korean War (1950-1953), a daughter of a Russian soldier stationed at Heungnam falls in love with a young Korean anti-Communist. Their love story shows how cruel the Russian soldiers were and how badly many North Koreans craved for freedom.

Banana In The Middle

This film depicts a struggle between a male and a female trying to win the banana on the table

The Manchurian Candidate

Near the end of the Korean War, a platoon of U.S. soldiers is captured by communists and brainwashed. Following the war, the platoon is returned home, and Sergeant Raymond Shaw is lauded as a hero by the rest of his platoon. However, the platoon commander, Captain Bennett Marco, finds himself plagued by strange nightmares and soon races to uncover a terrible plot.

Good Night, and Good Luck.

The story of journalist Edward R. Murrow's stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist witch-hunts in the early 1950s.

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

After a chance encounter with a wanted man, a woman is harassed by the police and press until she takes violent action.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

The film follows Mr. Shi, a retired widower from Beijing. When his only daughter, Yilan, who lives in Spokane, Washington and works as a librarian, gets divorced, he decides to visit her to help her heal. However, Yilan is not interested. She tries keeping an emotional distance but when this finally fails she begins physically avoiding her father. He confronts her about an affair with a married Russian man and she, in turn, lets loose about all the gossip she'd heard as a young girl about his alleged affair with a female colleague back in China.

The Motorcycle Diaries

Based on the journals of Che Guevara, leader of the Cuban Revolution. In his memoirs, Guevara recounts adventures he and best friend Alberto Granado had while crossing South America by motorcycle in the early 1950s.

Indochine

Set in colonial French Indochina during the 1930s to 1950s, this is the story of Éliane Devries, a French plantation owner, and of her adopted Vietnamese daughter, Camille, set against the backdrop of the rising Vietnamese nationalist movement.

The Way We Were

Opposites attract when, during their college days, Katie Morosky, a politically active Jew, meets Hubbell Gardiner, a feckless WASP. Years later, in the wake of World War II, they meet once again and, despite their obvious differences, attempt to make their love for each other work.

In One Hundred Years in May

Viktor Kingissepp has been the underground head of the Communist Party of Estonia for three years. He corresponds with Moscow, writes speeches for the members of the Communist Workers' Party and makes leaflets for the events of trade union. His purpose is to overthrow the Republic of Estonia since he does not believe in Estonian independence nor in any national ideals. Yet the clock keeps ticking, tuberculosis spreads rapidly, the world revolution is being postponed. What to do in order to make one's efforts work?

The Travelling Players

This expansive Greek drama follows a troupe of theater actors as they perform around their country during World War II. While the production that they put on is entitled "Golfo the Shepherdess," the thespians end up echoing scenes from classic Greek tales in their own lives, as Elektra plots revenge on her mother for the death of her father, and seeks help from her brother, Orestes, a young anti-fascist rebel.

Heroes for Sale

Tom Holmes is someone guided by honesty and moral rectitude, a heroic veteran of the World War I marked by the unbearable suffering caused by his battle wounds, a traumatized but courageous man who will experience, in the years to come, the pain of misfortune but also the happiness of success and hope and love for other human beings.

The Birth of New China

In the spring and summer of 1949, the People's Liberation Army launched an offensive under the orders of Mao Zedong and Zhu De, they crossed the Yangtze River and Nanjing was liberated on April 23 which signaled the fall of the KMT regime, Chiang Kai-Shek fled to Taiwan; on October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong standing on the rostrum of Tiananmen, solemnly declared the foundation of the People's Republic of China.

To Live

Fugui and Jiazhen endure tumultuous events in China as their personal fortunes move from wealthy landownership to peasantry. Addicted to gambling, Fugui loses everything. In the years that follow he is pressed into both the nationalist and communist armies, while Jiazhen is forced into menial work.

Land and Freedom

David Carr is a British Communist who is unemployed. In 1936, when the Spanish Civil War begins, he decides to fight for the Republican side, a coalition of liberals, communists and anarchists, so he joins the POUM militia and witnesses firsthand the betrayal of the Spanish revolution by Stalin's followers and Moscow's orders.

Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven

After a worker kills a superior and commits suicide, each of his family members attempts to forge a path forward in life.

The Human Factor

When a leak of information in the African section of British Intelligence is discovered, a security man is brought in to investigate.

The Iron Curtain

The Iron Curtain is based on the actual 1945 case of Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko, (Dana Andrews), who, after careful training, was assigned to the U.S.S.R. Embassy in Ottawa, Canada in the midst of World War II. Eventually, Gouzenko defected with 109 pages of material implicating several high level Canadian officials, outlined the steps taken to secure information about the the details of the nuclear bomb via numerous sleeper cells established throughout North America. The scandal that resulted when details of this case were publicized by American columnist Drew Pearson in early 1946 involved Canada, Britain and the United States.

Comrade Pedersen

A drama focused on Norwegian society in the 1970s, an era politically influenced by Marxism and Leninism.

The Woman on Pier 13

Communists blackmail a shipping executive into spying for them.

Butterfly

The film centres on Moncho and his coming-of-age experience in Galicia in 1936. Moncho develops a close relationship with his teacher Don Gregorio who introduces the boy to different things in the world. While the story centres on Moncho's ordinary coming-of-age experiences, tensions related to the looming Spanish Civil War periodically interrupt Moncho's personal growth and daily life.

Storm Center

Politicians go after a small-town librarian when she refuses to ban a book. She's quickly labeled a Communist.

Paper Dove

Juan, a young man convicted of terrorism, is given amnesty from a Lima prison; he boards a bus to return home and, in his mind's eye, recalls events in his village near Huaraz when he was 10 or 12. His father is long dead, his mother lives with Fermin, secretly a sympathizer with the Communist guerrillas in the hills. Town leaders are assassinated at night. When Juan discovers Fermin's secret, Juan is spirited away to the guerrillas to learn Marxist slogans and how to fight. When the band decides to attack the town to avenge the death of a comrade, Juan must choose.

Little Rose

Pressured by his superiors to disgrace public intellectual Warczewski, a professor and respected writer whom they believe to be a "camouflaged Zionist," rough security-services colonel Rozek enlists his sexy but naive girlfriend, Kamila, to insinuate herself into the distinguished older man's life and report on his every move. Not particularly interested in serving communism but eager to please her domineering lover, Kamila accepts the mission, reporting under the code name "Little Rose." As quick scenes contrast Kamila's crude pleasures with Rozek and her more refined experiences with Warczewski, it becomes clear that the more time the unschooled young woman spends with the professor, the more she comes to have true feelings for him.

Sacco & Vanzetti

Boston, 1920. Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are charged and unfairly tried for murder on the basis of their anarchist political beliefs.

Communists

Jean-Marie Straub pushes this musicality of blocks to a paroxysmal extreme, mixing blocks of time (40 years separate the various extracts that are going to be used, and what is to be filmed), blocks of text (Malraux, Fortini, Vittorini, Hölderlin) and blocks of language (French, Italian, German), and from this ruckus emerges the history of the world, yes, History with a capital H, and from the same movement, the political hope of its being overtaken. So this is an adventure film, about the Human adventure, still one that is always, in the end, overtaken by Nature. (Arnaud Dommerc)

Iyobinte Pusthakam

Set in the backdrop of the picturesque Munnar, it tells the story of Iyob, a slave-turned-master.

Roads to the South

France, 1975. Jean, an exiled Spanish Communist, is a successful screenwriter who, after a tragic event, struggles with his political commitment, his love for his country, under the boot of General Franco, whose death he and his comrades have waited for years, and his complicated relationship with his son. (A sequel to “The War Is Over,” 1966.)

A Man is Dead

Brest, 1950. The war ended five years ago and nothing remains of the city. Massive bombings and intense fighting lasting more than a month turned the city, its docks, its arsenal, into ashes. Thousands of workers will build it up again, brick by brick. But with awful work conditions protests quickly arise and a strike begins. Violent confrontations happen during manifestations. Until one man falls. The next day René Vautier lands at Brest clandestinely to make a movie about the movement.

Sons of Norway

It’s not easy to rebel when your dad wants to join the party... One day (in 1979), Magnus and his son Nikolaj hit the wall in their new terrace house in Rykkinn. Magnus is an architect, hippie and free spirit, a glaring exception in a community where equality and conformity is the norm. He always stands up for his son, supporting him unconditionally, even when Nikolaj decides to stop giving a damn.

Kala Viplavam Pranayam

Is a coming of age love story that follows the lives of four school friends who are trying to figure out their interests and options after school.

Arsenal

A soldier returns to Kyiv after surviving a train crash and encounters clashes between nationalists and collectivists.

Until Tomorrow, Comrades

Portugal, 1944. In a country oppressed by a brutal dictatorship, there are those who resist and mobilize the people to fight for bread and freedom, even if it cost them prison, torture or their lives.

The Steel Fist

In an Iron Curtain country an idealistic student goes on the run from the Communist authorities.

The Photographer of Mauthausen

Spanish photographer Francesc Boix, imprisoned in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, works in the SS Photographic Service. Between 1943 and 1945, he hides, with the help of other prisoners, thousands of negatives, with the purpose of showing the freed world the atrocities committed by the Nazis, exhaustively documented. He will be a key witness during the Nuremberg Trials.