Besa: The Promise
★ 10 · 2012 · 86m · Documentary
A documentary exploring how Albanians, including many Muslims, helped and sheltered Jewish refugees during WWII at their own risk, and trying to help the son of an Albanian baker that housed a Jewish family for a year return some Hebrew books that the family had to leave behind.
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Victory at Sea
1954 · ★ 9
A feature-length, condensed version of the 1952 documentary TV series 'Victory at Sea'.
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Umsonst Gelebt: Walter Schwarze
2005 · ★ 8
“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
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Tirpitz - The Last Battle
2007
The German battleship Tirpitz was a constant threat to Allied merchant ships from 1942. On November 12, 1944, the ship was sunk off the coast of Tromsø, where it had been lying damaged since being disabled off the coast of Alta in September 1943. Along with the Bismarck, the Tirpitz was Germany’s largest battleship, and its sinking was a significant blow to German prestige.
More info →33-45: The Channel's Superguns
2016
In WWII, the English Channel was a vital passageway. Here, explore the previously untold story of the invaluable superguns that guarded it.
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Night and Fog
1956 · ★ 8.3
Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.
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Raoul Wallenberg: Buried Alive
1983
A profile of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, the film covers his role in saving the lives of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, as well as exploring the evidence that he may still have been alive in a Soviet gulag as late as the early 1980s.
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Among Neighbors
2024 · ★ 10
Combining magical realism and evocative hand-drawn animation with revelatory interviews and verité footage, "Among Neighbors" examines the story of a small, rural town where Jews and Polish Catholics lived side by side for centuries before World War II. The film brings the Polish response to the Holocaust to life through the last living eyewitnesses, revealing both love and betrayal as it zeroes in on one of the last living Holocaust survivors from the town, and an aging eyewitness who saw Jews murdered there — not by Nazis, but by her own Polish neighbors. Produced and directed by award-winning filmmaker Yoav Potash ("Crime After Crime," Sundance Film Festival).
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Home Front
1940 · ★ 9
This short documentary is part of the Canada Carries On series of morale-boosting wartime propaganda films. In Home Front, the various WWII-era social contributions of women are highlighted. From medicine to industrial labour to hospitality, education and domesticity, the service these women provided to their country is lauded.
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2 or 3 Things I Know About Him
2005 · ★ 6.6
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)
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1995 · ★ 9
Filmmaker Rosanne Ehrlich unearths hundreds of letters her father wrote her mother while he was away from home, fighting in WWII, and shares them in this documentary that blends narration with, archival footage.
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