Degenerate Art (1993)

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.)

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.

KinderblocK - L’ultimo inganno

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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.

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.

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.

21 rue la Boétie

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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.)

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?

Roundabout Art

In Europe, road junctions have become public art galleries. A road trip across France, Switzerland, the Canary Islands, Greece and Germany exploring the glorious world of roundabout art.

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.

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.

Karajan: Portrait of a Maestro

An account of the life and work of controversial German orchestra conductor Herbert von Karajan (1908-89), celebrated as one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

Murder in Malexander

Depicts the controversial double police murder, involving neo-nazism and a theatre project by one of Scandinavia's most celebrated playwrights. The film traces a complex and fascinating chain of events leading up to the fatal climax in the picturesque small town of Malexander, Sweden.

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.

Repetitioner

The theatre 7:3 project was conducted at the Tidaholm prison 1998-1999. What started as an artistic experiment, ended up in police killings at Malexander. The process in the prison were filmed during 6 months.

Himmlerin kanteleensoittaja

"Himmlers Kantele Player" - about Finnish student, who decides to leave University of Sorbonne and walk from Paris to Helsinki in the spring of 1935. On his way, in Germany, he meets Heinrich Himmler, who is attracted by a traditional Finnish instrument, kantele. Himmler employs Yrjö as researcher to the Ahnenerbe institute to find the Aryan roots from the runic singing culture of Finnish Carelia.

Hippocrate aux enfers

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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.

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?

New York - Weltstadt der Kunst

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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.

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.".

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.

The Majesty of Art

A movie about an artist that had a vision about art and he had expressed that in his paintings, designs, fashion designs and photography and make virtual reality exhibition and virtual reality artworks that people can enjoy and feel it.

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.

Crisis

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

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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M'hamed Issiakhem

"A country without artists is a dead country... I hope we are alive..." It is in this film by Fawzi Sahraoui produced by the RTA in 1985 and filmed a few months before the painter M'hamed Issiakhem 'turns off this sentence is spoken. A very interesting docu-fiction in which Issiakhem delivers himself with finesse, passion and generosity.

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.