Sofia (1948)

Czechoslovak Architecture 58–89

Vladimir 518, uncompromising rapper, artist, stage designer and activist, is a rare phenomenon, who not only writes books, but publishes them as well. Today also a respected authority primarily on pre-1989 architecture, he has written not only a major publication on the subject, but also the story for two audiovisual works treating the same theme, which were shot by Jan Zajíček, renowned director of music videos. In addition to the recent TV series we have the eagerly anticipated feature-length film which, through its fascinating and impressive exploration of Czech and Slovak architecture of the latter half of the 20th century, offers exclusive insight into extraordinary buildings and unique individuals living below the Tatra Mountains. Karel Och (kviff.com)

Mantovani, the King of Strings

Known for his unmistakable cascading strings and recordings such as Charmaine, Mantovani enthralled the world with his sublime arrangements. This is the story of the man and his music.

Cine Gibi 4: Meninos e Meninas

Franjinha, the inventor kid in Monica's gang, tired of reading the comics, invents a new device to read the stories: a kind of a story-processor, that swallows the printed pages and projects the scenes in movement, on the wall.

NASA Presents: AMS - The Fight for Flight

NASA has produced a documentary about the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a particle physics experiment on the International Space Station. This film tracks the AMS's journey from the drawing table to its final home in the heavens, and one man's remarkable tenacity and unbreakable will to produce great science for the benefit of all humankind.

John Denver: Country Boy

This BBC documentary chronicles the life of folk/soft-rock singer John Denver through his rise with The Chad Mitchell Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary, his subsequent stardom, his popularity decline, and his tragic death at age 53.

Salammbô

Based on the historical novel by Flaubert, "Salammbo" tells the story of the Mercenary War between Carthage and the Barbarians in the third century BC.

Sound of Applause

The film tells about the flight of the poetic mind, which can satiate the poet and throw him from the sky to the bitter reality.

Secrets of Squirrels

Observe red squirrels in their home environment high up in the treetops as they engage in lovable antics, hide from predators and battle for food.

Classic Albums: Meat Loaf - Bat Out of Hell

Never one for understatement, the aptly named singer known as Meat Loaf (aka Marvin Lee Aday) teamed with operatically-minded pianist-composer Jim Steinman to produce a bombastic slab of 1970s classic rock that has become one of the biggest selling albums of all time. Fueled by Steinman's epic compositions, Todd Rundgren's grandiose production, and Meat Loaf's own soaring vocals, the singer's 1977 debut BAT OUT OF HELL elevated the rock-opera genre to appropriately theatrical heights with its extravagant orchestration and a melodramatic narrative celebrating teenage rebellion. This episode of the CLASSIC ALBUMS series recounts the making of this monumental work through interviews, archival footage, and live performances of album tracks such as "You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth," "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad," and, of course, the adolescent opus "Paradise by the Dashboard Light."

Hōkago Tachi

An omnibus movie that centered on "tutors"

Ju-rei: The Uncanny

Japanese school girls die violently after seeing a man wearing a black hood.

The Prizefighter and the Lady

An ex-sailor turned boxer finds romance and gets a shot at the heavyweight title.

Up

Franck gets fired by his best friend whom he squatted for months. After desperately looking for a place to create, he has only one solution: to flirt with a girl in the hope that she brings him home.

Gone with the Fish

Based on director Lotte Svendsen's own memories of her childhood on the Baltic island of Bornholm, but though it is set in 1981 the conflicts portrayed do not seem far away. At the start of the film Lars Erik and his wife Sonja are doing well on the Baltic island of Bornholm. Lars Erik is a successful fisherman, Sonja is a traditional housewife, proud of their new house bulging with consumer goods. Their love for each other is the sturdy footing on which their home is founded. Lars Erik employs three men on his trawler, and spends as fast as he earns, so when fishing quotas are cut he faces a crisis. One by one his men leave the boat, but he refuses to give up. Being a fisherman is like being a farmer - you depend on the wealth of mother nature herself. However, mother nature is like romance, highly capricious!

The Seven Revenges

The leaders of Circassians and Kyrgyz face off in a tournament divided into seven challenges: only one will gain the supremacy.

In the Cool of the Day

After he mends a marital rift between a vacationing young couple, the bored, fragile wife falls hopelessly in love with the husband's ex-colleague who is married to a long-suffering and emotionally and physically scarred woman. The couple soon runs off to Greece together to pursue the romance.

En Primera Persona: Adal Ramones y Adrián Uribe

Mexican TV icons Adal Ramones and Adrián Uribe open up about their childhood dreams, family issues, and the high cost of fame in a soul-baring interview. As multitalented on-air personalities, their careers in front of the camera are known to millions of people, but neither has shared details of their humble beginnings, troubled relationships, and controversies…until now.

Fanon hier, aujourd'hui

Who was Franz Fanon and what is his legacy today? Of yesterday and today, documentary maker Hassane Mezine gives voice to men and women who knew and shared with the flint warrior, according to Aimé Césaire's beautiful formula, privileged moments during the struggle but also in a family and friendly context.

Caught by Night

A communist journalist from Prague is sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp.

A Moonless Night

A divorced taxi driver shows up with a black eye at the home of his ex-wife’s new family; he’s been invited to dinner and he desperately wants to reconnect with his young daughter. A professional magician’s car breaks down and he ends up spending an emotionally intense night with a young, widowed toll booth worker. A singer songwriter serving a lengthy prison sentence is released for one night to perform at a local community centre. These three deeply engaging stories about yearning for connection unfold in parallel, one New Year’s Eve in a small town in central Uruguay, balancing the universality of human suffering with a powerful sense of hope.

Joyful Mystery

The fortunes of three impoverished friends and their families abruptly change after an airplane crashes in a nearby mountain. They rush to the crash site along with all the villagers, not to help the victims but to plunder their valuables. A dead American passenger carried a large amount of money in his briefcase which Mesiong, Ponsoy, and Jamin find and avariciously keep for themselves. But the town mayor gets greedy and with his hirelings abducts the three to divest them of their booty.

Short Working Day

A dramatisation of the workers' protests in June 1976 in Radom, seen from the perspective of the local Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party. [Produced in 1981, but not commercially released until 1996.]

Fair Game

A devoted wife and mother leads a secret life as a CIA agent until her husband’s article exposes a scandal, putting her identity and loved ones at risk. As her world crumbles, she must navigate the fallout of her double life.

The Human Factor

A low-ranking Secret Service agent is conned into supplying information to Eastern Bloc countries. Although he is not a suspect due to his unimportant position, when his office partner is hauled in as a suspect he realises he has got himself into very deep water.

Newton

A government clerk on election duty in a conflict-ridden jungle of Central India tries his best to conduct free and fair voting despite the apathy of security forces and the looming fear of guerrilla attacks by communist rebels.

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.

The Photograph

A young Greek man goes to Paris seeking help from a solitary and almost misanthropic distant relative who works as a furrier. With him, he takes nothing from his homeland but a photograph of a woman that he finds on the pavement. A misunderstanding regarding the photograph sets off a series of dramatic misunderstandings which trap him in a vicious circle of lies and fantasies.

Balkan Rules

Movie about secret relations between Yugoslavian, Serbian and Croatian secret police during last 50 years. Here in Balkans truth and lies are so much mixed and it lasts so long that no one knows the difference. That is why this fictitious story looks so true.

100 Days Before the Command

Visually astonishing, erotically charged and emotionally jarring. '100 Days Before the Command' is Hussein Erkenov's courageous and stinging indictment of communism. Five young Red Army recruits struggle for survival against the merciless violence that surrounds them on a daily basis. Their only means of saving their dignity is by preserving the humanity and compassion they share for each other.

Mirage

In New York City, David Stillwell struggles to recover his memory before the people who are trying to kill him succeed. Who is he, who are they, and why is he surrounded by murder?

The Russia House

Barley Scott Blair, a Lisbon-based editor of Russian literature who unexpectedly begins working for British intelligence, is commissioned to investigate the purposes of Dante, a dissident scientist trapped in the decaying Soviet Union that is crumbling under the new open-minded policies.

Superfluous

Young farmer Mikajlo while on youth labour action falls in love with a student Nada and infatuated with her, he leaves the peasant brigade and Malena, a girl who as if she were overabundant, followed him to work the labour action. Mikajlo's courtship of Nada provokes laughter and ridicule, so ambitious 'Don Juan' returns to his brigade and the girl.

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

British agent Alec Leamas refuses to come in from the Cold War during the 1960s, choosing to face another mission, which may prove to be his final one.

The Way We Were

Two desperate people have a wonderful romance, but their political views and convictions drive them apart.

The Ambush

Idealistic young man supports the party and the new Yugoslavia's communist regime, but soon gets involved in various political and criminal machinations becoming more and more confused about what's right and what's wrong.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 Woman on Pier 13

Communists blackmail a shipping executive into spying for them.

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.

The Funeral

After the funeral of one of their own, a criminal family decides to embark on an emotionally unnerving journey in an attempt to exact bloody revenge.

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.

Comrade Pedersen

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

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.

I Was a Communist for the FBI

A fact-based story about a man who posed as an American Communist for years as part of a secret plan to infiltrate their organization.

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.)

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.

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)

Trumbo

The career of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo is halted by a witch hunt in the late 1940s when he defies the anti-communist HUAC committee and is blacklisted.

Storm Center

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

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.

The Steel Fist

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

Arsenal

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

The Pacifist

A journalist preparing a story on extremist youth falls in love with a young radical who fears being killed by his companions when he is unable to commit a political assassination.

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.

Sandhesam

After his retirement, Raghavan Nair (Thilakan) is back at his home. His long cherished dream to spend his retired life along with his family is thwarted after seeing his two sons brawling each other over their political differences.

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.

The Love of Jeanne Ney

In the Crimea, the Reds and the Whites aren't done fighting, and Jeanne discovers that the man she loves is a Bolshevik (when he kills her father). Penniless, she returns to Paris where she works for her uncle. Soon after, her lover Andreas is in France to organize the sailors in Toulon. So also is a thief, traitor, and libertine, Khalibiev, who wants to seduce Jeanne. His schemes, Jeanne and Andreas's naivete, and a lost diamond bring the lovers to the brink of tragedy.

Hong Kong Confidential

An undercover U.S. agent searches for an Arab ruler's son kidnapped by communists in Hong Kong.

Blush

The film charts the fortunes of two women who loved each other as sisters, but whose paths diverge when the Revolution brings an end to their old way of life in the brothel.

Despite the Falling Snow

New York, 1961. Alexander Ivanov, a high-ranked Soviet bureaucrat, reluctantly defects to the West while is part of a diplomatic mission, feeling the grief of being unable to know the fate of his wife Katya, whom he has had to leave behind in Moscow. Only many years later, in 1991, he will finally find out the truth when his niece Lauren travels to Moscow to participate in a painting exhibition.

Project X

Project X was one of a cycle of anti-Red films produced in the late 1940s. Keith Andes plays an ex-Communist who is strongarmed into cooperating with the Feds. Pretending to become a "comrade" again, Andes rejoins the local Communist cell. Moving about freely, he is able to track down a gang of spies who are smuggling atomic secrets. Filmed on location in New York, Project X has the surface "feel" of a documentary, though the dialogue is strictly from the funny papers. Keep an eye out for a very young Jack Lord.

The House on Chelouche Street

A fatherless family immigrates to Israel from Egypt during the British Mandate period. The film traces the hardships the family suffers in the politically unstable country.

Red Chillies

Mohanlal plays the role of OMR, an affluent NRI who does oil business in Singapore. The movie begins on a new year before when the "Red Chilles", an all-girls music band with nine members, are involved in an accident. The girls flee from the place to leave their car behind. Moreover, the girls work for OMR and it was his car they drove around. OMR is forced to come down to India. As a mystery, several other characters come into light, including a party secretary portrayed by Thilakan and four policemen played by Siddique, Vijayaraghavan, Biju Menon and Ganesh Kumar.

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.

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 Killing of Angel Street

Jessica Simmonds returns from overseas to find her retired professor father in a bitter public fight to save the historic Sydney waterfront houses on Angel Street. After her father's mysterious death, she joins forces with local residents and a union leader against corrupt forces. Based on the real life mysterious disappearance of Juanita Nielsen.

They Say I'm a Communist

A worker overwhelmed by the economic crisis and the cost of living is accidentally propaganda of a political party, apparently from left, who convinces him to join their ranks and defending the working class. After entering through a ritual as mysterious as typical, you will realize demagoguery and arrangements existing between union leaders to maintain the status quo unchanged and profit from mafia practices.

Arabikkatha

Against his wishes, 'Cuba' Mukundan goes to Dubai to make good his father's alleged misappropriation of funds from the local cooperative bank. It is there that he learns the true meaning of the term 'working class' and realizes the irrelevance of the Communist movement back home.

Servants

Michal and Juraj, two students of a theological seminary in totalitarian Czechoslovakia, must decide if they'll choose the easier way of collaboration, or if they'll subject themselves to the surveillance of the secret police.

The Moonhunter

14th October 1973 event, the power of freedom was happened by a group of country. From Thammasat University through the line of soul to meet the death under the sheet of tricolor flag in the amidst of gun’s soot and friend’s cry.

The Red Detachment of Women

A filmed 1970 performance of the China Central Ballet Troupe. Adapted from the film of the same title, The Red Detachment of Women was first staged in Beijing in 1964 and was one of the Eight Model Operas which dominated the national stage during the Cultural Revolution.