Former inmates and American soldiers remember the cruel conditions in Buchenwald concentration camp.
Social & External
Self
Self (archive footage)
Germany, 1929. Helmut Machemer and Erna Schwalbe fall madly in love and marry in 1932. Everything indicates that a bright future awaits them; but then, in 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rise to power and their lives are suddenly put in danger because of Erna's Jewish ancestry.
In 1939, just finished the Spanish Civil War, Spanish republican photographer Francesc Boix escapes from Spain; but is captured by the Nazis in 1940 and imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp, in Austria, a year later. There, he works as a prisoner in the SS Photographic Service, hiding, between 1943 and 1945, around 20,000 negatives that later will be presented as evidence during several trials conducted against Nazi war criminals after World War II.
A captivating and personal detective story that uncovers the truth behind the childhood of Michaël Prazan's father, who escaped from Nazi-occupied France in 1942 thanks to the efforts of a female smuggler with mysterious motivations.
In the small town of Rechnitz a terrible crime against humanity was performed during the holocaust. Until now, no-one dares to talk about it.
A pig farm in Lety, South Bohemia would make an ideal monument to collaboration and indifference, says writer and journalist Markus Pape. Most of those appearing in this documentary filmed in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, France, Germany and Croatia have personal experience of the indifference to the genocide of the Roma. Many of them experienced the Holocaust as children, and their distorted memories have earned them distrust and ridicule. Continuing racism and anti-Roma sentiment is illustrated among other matters by how contemporary society looks after the locations where the murders occurred. However, this documentary film essay focuses mainly on the survivors, who share with viewers their indelible traumas, their "hole in the head".
One journalist described it as a chance "to see justice catch up with evil." On November 20, 1945, the twenty-two surviving representatives of the Nazi elite stood before an international military tribunal at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany; they were charged with the systematic murder of millions of people. The ensuing trial pitted U.S. chief prosecutor and Supreme Court judge Robert Jackson against Hermann Göring, the former head of the Nazi air force, whom Adolf Hitler had once named to be his successor. Jackson hoped that the trial would make a statement that crimes against humanity would never again go unpunished. Proving the guilt of the defendants, however, was more difficult than Jackson anticipated. This American Experience production draws upon rare archival material and eyewitness accounts to recreate the dramatic tribunal that defines trial procedure for state criminals to this day.
Even high Nazi leaders like Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring were almost contemptuous of this party comrad, and yet he was one of the most influential figures in the Third Reich: Julius Streicher, publisher of the anti-Semitic weekly "Der Stürmer", responsible for the worst propaganda and infamous for his corrupt and violent regime as Gauleiter of Franconia. By the Allies he was considered a symbol of Nazi hatred of the Jews. In 1946 he was sentenced to death in Nuremberg and executed.
Exploring the mechanisms of the Nazi seizure of power and focusing on forgotten sites in Saxony and Thuringia, the film investigates early "wild" concentration camps established after 1933 for the suppression of political opponents.
The Holocaust began with the indiscriminate mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen in the bloodlands of Eastern Europe and was perfected in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. “Bullets And Blueberries” explores the motives, methods and madness of the perpetrators, using never-before-seen images captured by the killers themselves — images that fully capture the banality of evil.
While searching for her grandmother, the director comes across the story of three brothers who are torn between the fronts of political ideologies in the Third Reich and divided Germany: "the third brother" is the filmmaker's grandfather, who, in confronting her father, tries to overcome decades of speechlessness and, in the process, to understand where in the past her father's sense of family fell by the wayside.
A poetic retelling of the experiences of Joseph Murakami, a fourteen-year-old boy from Darwin, who is summarily rounded up and interned by his government on the basis of his ethnicity, leaving wounds unhealed to this day.
“This film is part of a series of films on gay men who survived the Nazi era. I met Walter Schwarze when he was already in his eighties. My camera recorded his first public account of his five-year incarceration as a homosexual at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was in his fifties when he met Ali in his hometown of Leipzig; the two men became partners and remained close until his demise. And yet, Walter told me, he felt he had lived in vain because he had not had the good fortune of today's gays, who are able to grow up in freedom. Walter Schwarze died of cancer on May 10, 1998.” Rosa von Praunheim
Can a language save your life? Yes it can, even an ancient one from the 15th century. Saved by Language tells the story of Moris Albahari, a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo (born 1930), who spoke Ladino/Judeo-Spanish, his mother tongue, to survive the Holocaust. Moris used Ladino to communicate with an Italian Colonel who helped him escape to a Partizan refuge after he ran away from the train taking Yugoslavian Jews to Nazi death camps. By speaking in Ladino to a Spanish-speaking US pilot in 1944 he was able to survive and lead the pilot, along with his American and British colleagues, to a safe Partizan airport.
For four years (1977-1981) Esaias Baitel documented a violent Parisian neo-Nazi gang. Having gained their trust, he was able to get close to them. Living among the gang members, he witnessed horrific events, and while hiding his real identity, he photographed a one-of-a-kind collection of gripping stills. Over thirty years have passed. Esaias Baitel has laid his camera down. He returns to the dark nights he spent in the City of Lights, the city where he lived a double life, going back and forth from the gang to the young family he had just started.
A portrait of Pope Pius XII (1876-1958), head of the Catholic Church from 1939 until his death, who, during World War II, and while European Jews were being exterminated by the Nazis, was accused of keeping a disconcerting and shameful silence.
Amid the Holocaust’s unimaginable cruelty, a young boy finds hope in music. Eighty years later, Frank Grunwald shares his true story of survival and resilience, intertwined with American jazz, offering a powerful testament to the strength of the human spirit.
Stories of 12 gay and lesbian survivors of Nazism and the Holocaust.
The Polish city of Łódź was under Nazi occupation for nearly the entirety of WWII. The segregation of the Jewish population into the ghetto, and the subsequent horrors are vividly chronicled via newsreels and photographs. The narration is taken almost entirely from journals and diaries of those who lived–and died–through the course of the occupation, with the number of different narrators diminishing as the film progresses, symbolic of the death of each narrator.
What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)
When Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1944-45, their terrible discoveries were recorded by army and newsreel cameramen, revealing for the first time the full horror of what had happened. Making use of British, Soviet and American footage, the Ministry of Information’s Sidney Bernstein (later founder of Granada Television) aimed to create a documentary that would provide lasting, undeniable evidence of the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes. He commissioned a wealth of British talent, including editor Stewart McAllister, writer and future cabinet minister Richard Crossman – and, as treatment advisor, his friend Alfred Hitchcock. Yet, despite initial support from the British and US Governments, the film was shelved, and only now, 70 years on, has it been restored and completed by Imperial War Museums under its original title "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey".
Five Jewish Hungarians, now US citizens, tell their stories: before March 1944, when Nazis began to exterminate Hungarian Jews, months in concentration camps, and visiting childhood homes more than 50 years later. An historian, a Sonderkommando, a doctor who experimented on Auschwitz prisoners, and US soldiers who were part of the liberation in April 1945.
Ross McElwee sets out to make a documentary about the lingering effects of General Sherman's march of destruction through the South during the Civil War, but is continually sidetracked by women who come and go in his life, his recurring dreams of nuclear holocaust, and Burt Reynolds.
In the Realms of the Unreal is a documentary about the reclusive Chicago-based artist Henry Darger. Henry Darger was so reclusive that when he died his neighbors were surprised to find a 15,145-page manuscript along with hundreds of paintings depicting The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glodeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Cased by the Child Slave Rebellion.
An unprecedented and intimate look at the life, work and enduring legacy of British actress Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993).
Those who knew iconic funnyman John Candy best share his story, in their own words, through never-before-seen archival footage, imagery, and interviews.
The Captains is a feature-length documentary film written and directed by William Shatner. The film follows Shatner as he interviews the other actors who have portrayed starship captains in the Star Trek franchise.
Fourteen years after his first visit, Louis Theroux meets some of the growing community of religious-nationalist Israelis who have settled in the occupied West Bank.
A documentary on kids who attend a summer camp hoping to become the next Billy Graham.
A woman’s Holocaust memoir takes the world by storm, but a fallout with her publisher-turned-detective reveals her story as an audacious deception created to hide a darker truth.
An in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation's history of racial inequality.
Derek and Nancy Haysom were brutally murdered in their house in Lynchburg, Virginia, on March 30, 1985. Suspicion fell on their daughter Elizabeth and her boyfriend Jens Söring. They flee to Europe, but are caught and extradited to the U.S. Elizabeth is sentenced to 90 years in jail for incitement to murder, Jens Söring to two life sentences. Karin Steinberger, Marcus Vetter and their team spent over three years researching this case, which achieved world-wide notoriety. They uncovered new evidence, including the fact none of the blood samples found at the scene of the crime belonged to Jens Söring.
Behind-the-scenes documentary about how Lionel Messi succeeded in lifting the World Cup – the only trophy to have eluded him in an incredible career.
From a prolific career in film and television, Anton Yelchin left an indelible legacy as an actor. Through his journals and other writings, his photography, the original music he wrote, and interviews with his family, friends, and colleagues, this film looks not just at Anton's impressive career, but at a broader portrait of the man.
A detailing of the rise to prominence and global sporting superstardom of six supremely talented young Manchester United football players (David Beckham, Nicky Butt, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Phil and Gary Neville). The film covers the period 1992-1999, culminating in Manchester United's European Cup triumph.
Al Pacino's deeply-felt rumination on Shakespeare's significance and relevance to the modern world through interviews and an in-depth analysis of "Richard III."
This revealing documentary honors the legendary Sidney Poitier—iconic actor, filmmaker, and civil rights activist. Featuring interviews with Denzel Washington, Spike Lee, Halle Berry, and more.
A documentary about the life and films of director John Ford.
Using the book 'Fragments', which collects Marilyn Monroe's poems, notes and letters, and with participation from the Arthur Miller and Truman Capote estates who have contributed more material, each of the actresses will embody the legend at various stages in her life.
Stars of "The Walking Dead," Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira, walk down memory lane and visit iconic locations where pivotal moments between their characters, Rick and Michonne, were filmed.