Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas
★ 1 · 1953 · 11m · Documentary
A propaganda short commissioned by the United Fruit Company on the benefits they bring to Central America, such as creating jobs and delivering educational opportunities, which is something the Soviet Union could never understand.
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Oscar Arias: Without a Shot Fired
2017 · ★ 6
This is the story of a tiny country that made a decision to do something that no other country had ever done -- it decided to abolish its army and declare peace to the world. And this is the story of a young boy who grew up in that country, and how he ended up challenging -- and sometimes even convincing -- the greatest powers in the world to follow Costa Rica's example. "Oscar Arias: Without a Shot Fired" is a Don Quixote-like saga with great historical touchstones -- Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Cold War politics and Communism, Central American War and Peace. It follows a slight, academic, and most unlikely hero over the course of more than fifty years, as he travels the world in a quest to stop the spread of the weapons of war. In the end, it is a story about the triumph of reason, of the sparrow triumphing over the eagle, and how the impossible dream can sometimes come true.
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Camp Century: The Hidden City Beneath the Ice
2020 · ★ 7.5
How in 1959, during the heat of the Cold War, the government of the United States decided to create a secret military base located in the far north of Greenland: Camp Century, almost a real town with roads and houses, a nuclear plant to provide power and silos to house missiles aimed at the Soviet Union.
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Tragedy or Hope
1972
Contrasting radical mobs, anarchy, and 1960s counterculture with footage of American manufacturing and innovation, this film celebrates the concept of American exceptionalism and argues that anti-Vietnam War protesters were influenced by communism, atheism, and immorality. Set mostly in a university library, this political debate between a medical student, his 1770s ancestor, and a history professor is a sequel to the 1972 National Education Program film, Brink of Disaster! Two additional characters appear in this drama: a 19th-century steamboat captain, and the student’s grandfather - an early 20th-century automobile worker. The National Education Program at Harding College in Searcy, Arkansas created a variety of widely-distributed anti-communism films from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s.
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Brink of Disaster!
1972 · ★ 8
A student is held up in the library while a riot rages outside. As SDS protesters head to burn the library down, he has to fend them off with his baseball bat. This film opens with actual footage of civil disturbances in the 1960s, and moves on to images of historical American figures.
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Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films
2014 · ★ 7.2
A documentary about the rise and fall of the Cannon Film Group, the legendary independent film company helmed by Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus.
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Decade for Decision
1957 · ★ 6.3
Short news featurette produced by Pathe-RKO after the Russians launched the first orbiting satellite, Sputnik. It is a patriotic 'call to arms' from the threat posed by this and the need for Americans to spend more on education in general and a college education in particular. A visit to the University of Buffalo highlights its science programs and the need for more graduates from all technical disciplines if America is to rise to the challenge. It bemoans the fact the PhDs earn less than a mechanic and the need to re-order priorities.
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I Invite You to My Execution
2019 · ★ 7
As Russian writer Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) thinks it is impossible that his novel Doctor Zhivago is published in the Soviet Union, because it supposedly shows a critical view of the October Revolution, he decides to smuggle several copies of the manuscript out of the country. It is first published in 1957 in Italia and the author receives the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, which has consequences.
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The Beast Is Still Alive
2016 · ★ 6
A young Bulgarian girl digs into her grandfather's turbulent life in an attempt to unravel the past and find answers and explanations for the catastrophic fall of communism.
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Rich Hall's Red Menace
2019
2019 marks the 30th year since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Rich Hall examines the relationship between the West and the USSR in his inimitable fashion.
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This Is It
2009 · ★ 7.4
A compilation of interviews, rehearsals and backstage footage of Michael Jackson as he prepared for his series of sold-out shows in London.
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From Atatürk to Erdoğan: Building a Nation
2019 · ★ 7
Turkey's history has been shaped by two major political figures: Mustafa Kemal (1881-1934), known as Atatürk, the Father of the Turks, founder of the modern state, and the current president Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan, who apparently wants Turkey to regain the political and military pre-eminence it had as an empire under the Ottoman dynasty.
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