The Road to War (The End of an Empire) (2014)

The Pity of War

Professor Niall Ferguson argues that Britain's decision to enter the First World War was a catastrophic error that unleashed an era of totalitarianism and genocide.

The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1: The Moab Story

A comic study of 20th-century history, reconstructing the life of writer, creator and professional prisoner Tulse Luper. Born in 1911 Newport and last heard of in 1989, Luper’s life is pieced together from the evidence found in 92 suitcases scattered across the globe. In the first of three parts, we follow Luper through three distinct episodes: as a child during the First World War; as an explorer in Mormon Utah; and as a writer in Belgium during the rise of fascism.

Appointment in Bray

In 1917, the First World War is raging. Julien is from Luxemburg, so instead of having to go to war he studies piano in Paris. One day his friend Jacques, also a musician and now a fighter pilot on the front, invites him to spend a few days in his family's empty house in Bray. The housekeeper, a beautiful stoic woman lets Julien in, but his friend is late and he is obliged to wait. In the meantime, he starts reminiscing of the pre-war days spent with his friend and Jacques' girlfriend Odile.

Field Punishment No.1

In 1916, the New Zealand Government secretly shipped 14 of the country's most outspoken conscientious objectors to the Western Front in an attempt to convert, silence, or quite possibly kill them. This is their story.

The Cardinal

A young Catholic priest from Boston confronts bigotry, Nazism, and his own personal conflicts as he rises to the office of cardinal.

Queen Marie of Romania

Devastated by the First World War and plunged into political controversy, Romania's every hope accompanies its Queen on her mission to Paris, to lobby for its great unification's international recognition at the 1919 Peace Talks.

A Very Long Engagement

Young Frenchwoman Mathilde searches for the truth about her missing fiancé, lost during World War I, and learns many unexpected things along the way. The love of her life is gone. But she refuses to believe he's gone forever — and she needs to know for sure.

The Big Parade

The story of an idle rich boy who joins the US Army's Rainbow Division and is sent to France to fight in World War I, becomes friends with two working class men, experiences the horrors of trench warfare, and finds love with a French girl.

Legends of the Fall

In early 20th-century Montana, Col. William Ludlow lives on a ranch in the wilderness with his sons, Alfred, Tristan, and Samuel. Eventually, the unconventional but close-knit family are bound by loyalty, tested by war, and torn apart by love, as told over the course of several decades in this epic saga.

Bluebeard

Paris, France, during the First World War. While thousands of soldiers die every day on the battlefields, Henri Landru, a seemingly respectable furniture dealer, married and father of four children, relentlessly feeds his own sinister factory of death.

Fort Saganne

In 1911, a willful and determined man from peasant stock named Charles Saganne enlists in the military and is assigned to the Sahara Desert under the aristocratic Colonel Dubreuilh.

Peter Handke: In the Woods, Might Be Late

In the sixties, Peter Handke was one of the first to show how the business works: the writer as angry young man and pop star of the literary scene. As soon as he was on the bestseller lists, he turned his back on the hype. For many years, he has lived and worked in his house in a Parisian suburb, more quietly and more hospitably. Peter Handke's precise, free gaze becomes perceptible in his texts, his conversations, the cosmos of his notebooks.

The Man from Yesterday

A woman whose husband never came home from World War I finds herself in love with her doctor. She travels with him to Switzerland, and as they check into the hotel there, she is astounded to see her supposedly dead husband.

The Necessary War

In a single documentary to mark the 100-year anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War, Sir Max Hastings presents the argument that although it was a great tragedy, far from being futile, the First World War was completely unavoidable.

The Harlem Hellfighters' Great War

Nicknamed the "Harlem Hellfighters", these African-Americans wanted to become ordinary citizens like everyone else. They saw fighting heroically in the trenches as their chance to achieve this. In 1918, the 15th New York National Guard Regiment became the most highly decorated unit of the First World War.

The Last Parade

During the war two friends love the same nurse. After the war one becomes a detective, the other a racketeer.

Sky Devils

Wilkie and Mitchell, trying to desert their draft into the army, stow away on a ship which takes them into the war zone. While AWOL, the rivals for Mary's affections accidently destroy an ammunition dump.

Turkish Ice Cream

In 1915, two Turks in Australia make a living by selling ice cream. When they hear war has broken out, they decide to go to Çanakkale. Authorities don't let them leave the island, so the two decide to put up a fight in Australia.

Defenders of Riga

The film dramatizes November 11, 1919- a crucial date in the battle for Latvian independence. A year after the end of the official hostilities of WWI, a renegade German general and troops remain outside the Latvian capital. Latvian riflemen, most of them inexperienced volunteers, somehow managed to defeat a larger, better-armed force of German and Russian mercenaries.

Farewell AKAB Okretnica

As one of Belgrade’s last DIY anti-nationalist spaces faces closure, its community gathers for a final night — a farewell that becomes a quiet act of resistance.

A Soldier's Plaything

A pair of hapless half-wits get into continuous mischief during the occupation of Germany after WW I.

Chances

Two brothers, Jack and Tom, are in love with the same woman, Molly. While the two brothers go off to war and Molly does her part in the effort, Tom believes that Molly is waiting for him, while in fact, she loves Jack and only turned to Tom on the rebound. Jack and Molly meet while he is on leave, and when he returns to battle, he doesn't know how to handle the situation with Tom.

Sea Dreams

First World War animated propaganda short, extolling Britain's naval history and mocking the German navy.

The Keeper of the Bees

A severely traumatized World War I veteran, believing that he's living on borrowed time, comes upon a peaceful little village and meets an old man called Bee Master and his protégé, Little Scout, who try to convince him that he has more to live for than he thinks he does.

Anton

Ukraine, 1919. The friendship of two boys, Anton and Jacob, one Christian, the other Jewish, manages to survive the prejudices and hatred that dominate the minds of adults in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution.

3211

The film 3211 is a true story about Stefan Djuric, a successful musician who one day loses everything and goes to prison, where only his songs remain from his former life.

Mata Hari, Agent H21

Ordered to seduce French captain and steal from him classified papers, Mata Hari, an exotic dancer and a spy, instead falls in love with him and blows the cover.

Gallipoli: End of the Road

Corporal Muhsin is a sharp shooter who previously fought in the Balkan War. When mobilization is declared again, he joins the war alongside his brother Hasan. The two brothers support each other in the fight against the enemy.

Cheyenne's Pal

During World War I, westerner Cheyenne Harry is a horse seller, but he refuses to part with his favorite horse and friend, Cactus. One night, broke and drunk, he sells Cactus to an Englishman for $350 which he soon loses gambling. When Harry discovers that Cactus is being sent to the war in France and probable death, he gets a horse- tending job on the ship. When they get the opportunity Harry jumps off the ship with Cactus and they swim to shore. Harry is eventually caught but is allowed to work off his debt and keep Cactus.

Kamerad

Destitute in a crater in the heart of no man's land, two men await their fate as soldiers and human beings amid a great war of conscience.

The Unbeliever

A wealthy young American, bred to class distinction and racial intolerance, enters the Marines during the First World War. In the course of his training and his experiences in the trenches fighting, being wounded by, and being hospitalized with Germans, he comes to a recognition of the equality and brotherhood of men.

The Lost Battalion

World War I, October 1918. The more than 500 men of the 77th Infantry Division of the United States Army, who have been recruited in New York City and trained in Yaphank, are sent to France, to help break down the German defenses located in the Argonne forest…

Benediction

Poet Siegfried Sassoon survived the horrors of fighting in the First World War and was decorated for his bravery, but became a vocal critic of the government's continuation of the war when he returned from service. Adored by members of the aristocracy as well as stars of London's literary and stage world, he embarked on affairs with several men as he attempted to come to terms with his homosexuality.

50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. and Mrs. Kraus

In the spring of 1939, Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus embarked on a risky and unlikely mission. Traveling into the heart of Nazi Germany, they rescued 50 Jewish children from Vienna and brought them to the United States.

Letters

LETTERS, a dramatic historical fiction written by Mrs. Evelyn Merritt in 2010, tells the story of U.S. soldiers and their loved ones through their correspondence beginning with the Civil War and ending with the War in Iraq. Sahuarita High School students adapted the Readers’ Theatre play into a movie, reasoning the student actors would be kept safe from Covid-19 by filming them individually, and afterward the footage could be reassembled into a screenplay following the original dialogue.

The Other Side

The First World War. The young, English Lieutenant Raleigh is sent to the company of a disillusioned Captain Stanhope. Stanhope is secretly engaged to Raleigh's sister and is intent on protecting his image of an exemplary officer. An attack on the German lines, in which Raleigh also takes part, has turned into a bloody fiasco. Now Raleigh, too, knows the horrors of war, which have already taken their toll on Stanhope.

Mother at War

1918. World War I rages in Europe while Erna Jensen tends to her ordinary life at home in Bramstrup, with her simple-minded son, Kalle. One day the village constable comes to enlist Kalle for military service for the German Empire – of which Southern Jutland is a part. If Erna is to save Kalle from certain death, she must follow him through thick and thin. Upon a chance meeting with a deserting solder she trades identities. Now disguised as Private Julius Rasmussen, Erna heads for the front. In her encounters with the other soldiers and in the presence of the war, unknown sides of Erna are awoken. This is the story of a woman who won’t let a war prevent her from fighting for what she loves.

Doctor Zhivago

The life of a Russian physician and poet who, although married to another, falls in love with a political activist's wife and experiences hardship during World War I and then the October Revolution.

The Great Dictator

Dictator Adenoid Hynkel tries to expand his empire while a poor Jewish barber tries to avoid persecution from Hynkel's regime.

Lawrence of Arabia

During World War I, English officer Thomas Edward 'T.E.' Lawrence sets out to unite and lead the diverse, often warring, Arab tribes to fight the Turks.

Paths of Glory

A commanding officer defends three scapegoats on trial for a failed offensive that occurred within the French Army in 1916.