Degenerate Art (1993)

Jean Moulin, une affaire française

Drama set in the Second World War, focused on Jean Moulin, hero, martyr and symbol of the French resistance and the patriotism during the dark years of Nazi occupation.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days

In 1943, as Hitler continues to wage war across Europe, a group of college students mount an underground resistance movement in Munich. Dedicated expressly to the downfall of the monolithic Third Reich war machine, they call themselves the White Rose. One of its few female members, Sophie Scholl is captured during a dangerous mission to distribute pamphlets on campus with her brother Hans. Unwavering in her convictions and loyalty to the White Rose, her cross-examination by the Gestapo quickly escalates into a searing test of wills as Scholl delivers a passionate call to freedom and personal responsibility.

Bauhaus 100

In 1919 an art school opened in Germany that would change the world forever. It was called the Bauhaus. A century later, its radical thinking still shapes our lives today. Bauhaus 100 is the story of Walter Gropius, architect and founder of the Bauhaus, and the teachers and students he gathered to form this influential school. Traumatised by his experiences during the Great War, and determined that technology should never again be used for destruction, Gropius decided to reinvent the way art and design were taught. At the Bauhaus, all the disciplines would come together to create the buildings of the future, and define a new way of living in the modern world.

Goering's Catalogue: A Collection of Art and Blood

For more than a decade, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler's right-hand man during the infamous Third Reich, assembled a collection of thousands of works of art that were meticulously catalogued.

Fascism in Colour

After the World War I, Mussolini's perspective on life is severely altered; once a willful socialist reformer, now obsessed with the idea of power, he founds the National Fascist Party in 1921 and assumes political power in 1922, becoming the Duce, dictator of Italy. His success encourages Hitler to take power in Germany in 1933, opening the dark road to World War II. (Originally released as a two-part miniseries. Includes colorized archival footage.)

Joe Lycett: Summer Exhibitionist

Art-loving comedian Joe Lycett joins artists hoping to make it onto the walls of the RA Summer Exhibition 2022, the world’s largest open-submission art contest.

The Case of Bruno Lüdke

The incredible story of Bruno Lüdke (1908-44), the alleged worst mass murderer in German criminal history; or actually, a story of forged files and fake news that takes place during the darkest years of the Third Reich, when the principles of criminal justice, subjected to the yoke of a totalitarian system that is beginning to collapse, mean absolutely nothing.

Hitler's Hollywood

Film journalist and critic Rüdiger Suchsland examines German cinema from 1933, when the Nazis came into power, until 1945, when the Third Reich collapsed. (A sequel to From Caligari to Hitler, 2015.)

Who was Hitler

Hitler's biography told like never before. Besides brief historical localizations by a narrator, only contemporaries and Hitler himself speak: no interviews, no reenactment, no illustrative graphics and no technical gadgets. The testimonies from diaries, letters, speeches and autobiographies are assembled with new, often unpublished archive material. Hitler's life and work are thus reflected in a unique way in interaction with the image of the society in the years 1889 to 1945.

Hanussen

A man's story parallels Hitler's rise. Austrian Klaus Schneider, wounded in World War I, recovers in the care of Dr. Emil Bettleheim. Bettleheim discovers that Schneider possesses powers of empathy and of clairvoyance, such that could aid suicidal patients. After the war, with one friend as his manager and another as his lover, Schneider changes his name to Eric Jan Hanussen and goes to Berlin, as a hypnotist and clairvoyant performing in halls and theaters. He always speaks the truth, which brings him to the attention of powerful Nazis. He predicts their rise (good propaganda for them) and their violence (not so good). He's in pain and at risk. What is Hanussen's future?

Poland 1939: When German Soldiers Became War Criminals

September 1st, 1939. Nazi Germany invades Poland. The campaign is fast, cruel and ruthless. In these circumstances, how is it that ordinary German soldiers suddenly became vicious killers, terrorizing the local population? Did everyone turn into something worse than wild animals? The true story of the first World War II offensive that marks in the history of infamy the beginning of a carnage and a historical tragedy.

Language Does Not Lie

Victor Klemperer (1881-1960), a professor of literature in Dresden, was Jewish; through the efforts of his wife, he survived the war. From 1933 when Hitler came to power to the war's end, he kept a journal paying attention to the Nazis' use of words. This film takes the end of 1945 as its vantage point, with a narrator looking back as if Klemperer reads from his journal. He examines the use of simple words like "folk," "eternal," and "to live." Interspersed are personal photographs, newsreel footage of Reich leaders and of life in Germany then, and a few other narrative devices. Although he's dispassionate, Klemperer's fear and dread resonate

The Dead Nation

A documentary-essay which shows Costică Axinte's stunning collection of pictures depicting a Romanian small town in the thirties and forties. The narration, composed mostly from excerpts taken from the diary of a Jewish doctor from the same era, tells the rising of the antisemitism and eventually a harrowing depiction of the Romanian Holocaust.

100 Years of the UFA

The intricate history of UFA, a film production company founded in 1917 that has survived the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, the Adenauer era and the many and tumultuous events of contemporary Germany, and has always been the epicenter of the German film industry.

Achieving the Unachievable

M.C. Escher is among the most intriguing of artists. In 1956 he challenged the laws of perspective with his graphic Print Gallery and his uncompleted master-piece quickly became the most puzzling enigma of modern art. Fifty years later, can mathematician Hendrik Lenstra complete it? Should he?

Hitler's Junkies

In Third Reich, the abuse of drugs made commanders and soldiers feel invincible. The Führer himself took them on daily basis. This is the unbelievable story of the D-IX project and of methamphetamines, which, abundantly furnished to soldiers, changed the course of history.

Special Section

In occupied France during the WWII, a German officer is murdered. The collaborationist Vichy government decides to pin the murder on six petty criminals. Loyal judges are called in to convict them as quickly as possible.

New York - Weltstadt der Kunst

Plot unavailable

The Hiding Place

Corrie and Betsie ten Boom are middle-aged sisters working in their father's watchmaker shop in pre-World War II Holland. Their uneventful lives are disrupted with the coming of the Nazis. Suspected of hiding Jews and caught breaking rationing rules, they are sent to a concentration camp, where their Christian faith keeps them from despair and bitterness.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Banksy is a graffiti artist with a global reputation whose work can be seen on walls from post-hurricane New Orleans to the separation barrier on the Palestinian West Bank. Fiercely guarding his anonymity to avoid prosecution, Banksy has so far resisted all attempts to be captured on film. Exit Through the Gift Shop tells the incredible true story of how an eccentric French shop keeper turned documentary maker attempted to locate and befriend Banksy, only to have the artist turn the camera back on its owner.

Forbidden Films

Between 1933 and 1945 roughly 1200 films were made in Germany, of which 300 were banned by the Allied forces. Today, around 40 films, called "Vorbehaltsfilme", are locked away from the public with an uncertain future. Should they be re-released, destroyed, or continue to be neglected? Verbotene Filme takes a closer look at some of these forbidden films.

Hitler: The Last Ten Days

Hitler: The Last Ten Days takes us into the depths of der Furher’s Berlin bunker during his final days. Based on the book by Gerhard Boldt, it provides a bleak look at the goings-on within, and without.

Francofonia

Master filmmaker Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark) transforms a portrait of the world-renowned museum into a magisterial, centuries-spanning reflection on the relation between art, culture and power.

Crisis

A documentary about the conquest of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis just prior to World War 2.

The Butcher of Prague

Czechoslovakia, 1941. As the war continues, Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich arrives in Nazi-occupied Prague and establishes a regime of terror that will force freedom fighters to act. But the price to pay will be too high.

Avant la catastrophe - La Chute de la République de Weimar (1930-1933)

Plot unavailable

Hippocrate aux enfers

Plot unavailable

Lisztomania

In the 19th century, Romantic composer/pianist Franz Liszt tries to end his hedonistic ways but keeps getting sucked back in by his seductive fellow composer Richard Wagner.

Hitler: A Career

A keen chronicle of the unlikely rise to power of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) and a dissection of the Third Reich (1933-1945), but also an analysis of mass psychology and how the desperate crowd can be deceived and shepherded to the slaughterhouse.

Hitler's Children

This exclusive documentary recounts the crazy project of Nazi Germany which secretly gave birth to Aryan children as far as France. In these maternities for the rich called the ‘Lebensborn’, the Nazis raised ‘perfect’ children born of progenitors from the SS and women with well defined racial grounds. This plan gave birth to thousands of children who were called ‘Hitler's Children’. They were supposed to lead the world one day. It wasn’t until 30 years later that the existence of one of these centers in France was discovered. For the very first time, the children born in the ‘Lesenborn’ in Lamorlaye find out about their existence and disclose one the most frightening plans of History, as well as the dark secret of their origins.

Treblinka's Last Witness

Samuel Willenberg and Kalman Taigman, the last two survivors of the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka, recount the horrors they experienced during the war and talk about their lives after their escape in a prisoner uprising in 1943. Willenberg would go on to become a hero of the 1944 Warsaw uprising while Taigman would be called as a witness during the infamous trial of Adolf Eichmann.

Ravensbrück: The forgotten camp

Located nearly 80 kilometres north of Berlin, Germany, the former municipality of Ravensbrück was home to a prison between 1939 and 1945 that became a concentration camp designed specifically for women. It was built by order of Heinreich Himmler, a high dignitary of the Third Reich and head of the SS. Of the more than 130,000 people who were deported there, almost 90,000 never returned. Based on witnesses, international experts and computer-generated images, the document reveals the atrocities committed in Ravensbrück.

The Tramp and the Dictator

A look at the parallel lives of Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler and how they crossed with the creation of the film “The Great Dictator,” released in 1940.

A Brief History of John Baldessari

The epic life of a world-class artist, jammed into six minutes.

The Butler

The love between Mateusz Krol, a Kashubian boy, and Marita von Krauss, a Prussian aristocrat in whose family home he is taken in when his mother dies, grows and matures thorough the years, while Kashubia, the northern Polish region where they live, suffers the consequences of the tragedies that will ravage Europe from the beginning of the 20th century until the end of the World War II.

Hitler's SS: Portrait in Evil

The two-part TV movie Hitler's SS: Portrait in Evil crystallizes that evil by concentrating on two Berlin brothers. In 1931, Helmut Hoffman a brilliant student and self-styled opportunist, joins Hitler's SS. At the same time, his younger brother Karl, a top athlete and idealist, becomes a chauffeur for the "S.A.".

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.

Ahnenerbe : Les Terribles Savants d'Hitler

The Ahnenerbe (The adopted heritage). A pseudo-scientific organization which, under Heinrich Himmler's orders, has sought by all means to prove the superiority of the Aryan race over the centuries.

Dirty Wolves

Galicia, Spain, during the Second World War The life of Manuela, a mysterious miner who was branded a witch, changes with the arrival of an Allied commando, in charge of sabotaging the production of tungsten, a vital mineral for the continuity of the war effort of Nazi Germany.

A Revolution on Canvas

In this hybrid political thriller and verité portrait documentary, Sara Nodjoumi, working with co-director and husband, Till Schauder, makes her directorial debut with this personal film, diving into the mystery surrounding the disappearance of more than 100 “treasonous” paintings by her father, seminal Iranian modern artist Nickzad Nodjoumi.

Research and Crime: the Reich University of Strasbourg

Strasbourg was home to one of three Reich Universities founded by the Nazis, known as a project close to Hitler's heart. The university, founded in 1941, is infamous for the human experiments performed on KZ prisoners by the professors of the medical faculty. What did its dean, Johannes Stein, grandfather of documentarian Kirsten Esch, know of these crimes?

Hanging from a Dream

The history of how the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art of Cuenca was created. In the mid-1950s, the Spanish collector and painter Fernando Zóbel de Ayala (1924-84) becomes fascinated by the young generation of Spanish abstract artists, so he begins to collect their works to show them to the public in Toledo. Until Gustavo Torner, a young forest engineer interested in art, proposes him to visit his city, Cuenca.

Boy 23: The Forgotten Boys of Brazil

The film accompanies the investigation of the historian Sidney Aguilar after the discovery of bricks marked with Nazi swastikas in the interior of São Paulo. They then discover a horrifying fact that during the 1930s, fifty black and mullato boys were taken from an orphanage in Rio de Janeiro to the farm where the bricks were found. There they were identified by numbers and were submitted to slave labour by a family that was part of the political and economic elite of the country and who did not hide their Nazi sympathizing ideals.

Looking for Modern Art: Rethinking Art History

Many twentieth century European artists, such as Paul Gauguin or Pablo Picasso, were influenced by art brought to Europe from African and Asian colonies. How to frame these Modernist works today when the idea of the primitive in art is problematic?

Black Sun

A historical analysis of how groups such as the Nazi’s may use language, symbols, and religious connotation in order to come to power. It raises questions that deserve in depth analysis and consideration. Questions include: Where do legends expand our thinking and where do they bury it? When does spiritual pursuit suddenly turn into fanaticism and violence? Last, have we as a society learned from our past, and if so have forgotten the lessons of the 20th Century? Are we now embarking on a new level only to learn the same old lessons about humanity again? In addressing these questions we are taken into the back drop of the history of Germany beginning in the late 1800’s through the late 20th Century at the eve of the 21st. “A society that does not take archetypes, myths, and symbols seriously will possibly be jumped by them from behind.”

One Fire One Mouth

J Fever, China’s greatest “rap poet”, reinvents the origin myth of fire, in an exquisite performance with Shanghai Philharmonic in Shanghai Concert Hall, featuring composer Soulspeak and Yehaiyahan.

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.

1945: The Savage Peace

How, in 1945, after the end of World War II and the fall of the Nazi regime, the defeated were atrociously mistreated, especially those ethnic Germans who had lived peacefully for centuries in Germany's neighboring countries, such as Czechoslovakia and Poland. A heartbreaking story of revenge against innocent civilians, the story of acts as cruel as the Nazi occupation during the war years.

Dawn of the Nazis

How Germany was when its people entered the nightmare of World War II? Despair and fear lead a hungry population to follow the chilling call of just one man to world domination. A real-life horror story, an ominous tale of violence and deception, which takes place from 1919 to 1934. (Entirely made up of restored, colorized archival footage.)

Winston Churchill: A Giant in the Century

A new look at the public and private life of one of the most important statesmen in the history of Europe: Winston Churchill (1874-1965), soldier, politician, writer, painter, leader of his country in the darkest hours, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, a myth, a giant of the 20th century.

The Magnate

This Polish historical drama film traces the fascinating saga of a wealthy, princely Polish dynasty in years 1900-1935.

Holy Silence

As World War II looms, Pope Pius XI calls on a humble American priest to help him challenge the evils of Nazism and anti-Semitism. But death intervenes, and Pope Pius XII now carries out a very different response to Hitler and the Holocaust.

The Hitler–Stalin Pact

How could Hitler and Stalin, sworn ideological enemies, come to a secret pact in 1939? The captivating and detailed story of the diplomatic fiasco that led to the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact and its devastating consequences.

Attack and Retreat

Chronicle of the unheralded and unsuccessful invasion of the Soviet Union by the Italian army during World War II.

The Girl with the Instagram

Nagyvárad, Hungary, 1944. From February to June, Eva Heyman, a 13-year-old Jewish girl, wrote a diary describing the harsh conditions of her life under Nazi occupation. How would she have told her story if she had used Instagram?

Hitler's Evil Science

In 1935, German scientists dug for bones; in 1943, they murdered to get them. How the German scientific community supported Nazism, distorted history to legitimize a hideous system and was an accomplice to its unspeakable crimes. The story of the Ahnenerbe, a sinister organization created to rewrite the obscure origins of a nation.

Rouge ! L'Art au pays des soviets

In the Russian Empire of the 1910s, a group of visionary painters revolutionized the aesthetic norms of their time and opted for radical abstraction. In the years between the seizure of power by the Russian Bolsheviks and Stalinism in the 1930s, the avant-gardists developed a new form of art that ushered in modernism.

Stolen Children

June 1941, during World War II. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler orders the mass abduction of particularly well-bred young children from Poland and the occupied territories of the Soviet Union in order to be educated in German culture, by both state schools and German families…

21 rue la Boétie

Plot unavailable