On August 21, 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City, after eleven years of exile. The killer, Ramon Mercader, a young Spanish communist, was a character straight out of a spy movie. He was recruited in 1937 by Stalin's secret service when the latter decided to eliminate Trotsky, that tireless opponent. Through the epic story of Trotsky's last years in exile in Mexico, enriched with flashbacks to his political past, this film, a true historical thriller, offers a cross-narrative between Trotsky's life in exile and the setting up, at the same time, of "Operation Duck", the code name for his assassination.
In Footsteps, Fiona Tan creates connections between personal stories and the world around us. The footage shows children at play and Dutch windmills, but above all people engaged in heavy physical labour in the countryside and in factories. In a fascinating juxtaposition, she combines these images with excerpts from letters she received from her father just after she moved to the Netherlands in the late 1980s. Through his education in Indonesia, Tan’s father knew a lot about the Netherlands without ever having visited the country. In the letters, he meanders seamlessly between personal news and world events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing.
By decoding ancient hieroglyphic texts, Jean-François Champollion gave voice to an enigmatic civilization, but behind his legendary feat is a mysterious brother who made it possible. The recent discovery of correspondence between Jean-François Champollion and his brother Jacques-Joseph now allows us to fully understand how a young, self-taught genius was able to make one of the most important discoveries of the 19th century. Without the ingenuity and unfailing support of his older brother, Jean-François would never have succeeded in solving this enigma, which had international repercussions. With animated sequences of their private correspondence, and with the help of archives and expert analysis, this film revisits this unique scientific, human and intellectual adventure to celebrate the bicentenary of the decoding of hieroglyphics.
The film is based on the true story of the Great Catholic Christian Massacre of nearly 700 Christians that took place in 1544 in Mannar and the chain of events related to the same massacre that took place in 1560.
Paul Baumer and his friends Albert and Muller, egged on by romantic dreams of heroism, voluntarily enlist in the German army. Full of excitement and patriotic fervour, the boys enthusiastically march into a war they believe in. But once on the Western Front, they discover the soul-destroying horror of World War I.
Shedding new light on a possible cover up spanning two continents. It's not only a tale about the airship's demise, but sinister secrets including ties to the Nazi party. Plus rarely seen footage of crash from inside the ship.
Explore the 500-year history of the city of San Juan, from the move from Caparra to the different invasions during these centuries. It also looks at how different situations and people were key to what is now the capital of Puerto Rico. This documentary presents, through the recreation of key situations, archival material, and accounts of historians and researchers, decisive moments that influenced what is now the capital.
Queen Elizabeth II is the longest-reigning monarch in the history of Great Britain and the Commonwealth. While her service to her country is legendary, she has become a figure of strength, endurance, and dignity the world over and indeed we all feel connected to her. Through triumph, loss, scandal, and celebration, witness the story of how a young Princess became Queen to the people of the world.
The history of the confrontation between two worlds: the Grand Duchy of Moscow and the Ural Parma, the ancient Perm lands inhabited by pagans. Here heroes and ghosts, princes and shamans, Voguls and Muscovites will clash. At the center of the conflict of civilizations is the fate of the Russian prince Mikhail, who fell in love with the young Tiche, a witch-lamia capable of taking on the form of a lynx. Passion for the pagan and fidelity to forbidden love, a campaign against the Voguls, bloody battles and a short peace, the battle between Muscovy and Parma, the hero will face trials in which it is not so terrible to part with life as to commit treason.
The amazing story of Cifesa, a mythical film production company founded in Valencia by the Casanova family that managed to dominate the box office during the turbulent times of the Second Spanish Republic, the carnage of the Civil War and the hardships of the long post-war period and Franco's dictatorship — and survive until the sixties, when Spain was timidly beginning to change.
The true story of an operation which was a revolution, not only for the world of medicine. Frankfurt 1967. A young doctor called Lisa Scheel is trying to get a foothold in the male-dominated world of transplant surgery. But after she is passed over by her main professor in favour of a male applicant, on the spur of the moment Lisa heads off to Cape Town. Here, she starts work for Dr. Barnaard, who, like his colleagues in Frankfurt, is planning a heart transplantation. Together with the surgeon Hamilton Naki, who due to apartheid can only join the team secretly, Lisa is a major contributor to the first heart transplant in history.
Musamoni Panigrahi (1920s–2017), fondly called “Nani Ma” by her neighbours, appears in the centre of this first film in the Baleswari dialect of India's Odia language. The story revolves around folklore and folk songs narrated by Nani Ma. Born in the 1920s in pre-independent rural India in a coastal village in the Balasore district of Odisha, she never got to go beyond the first few days of school. The film is an alternate history of a society broken through colonization, Brahminical patriarchy and a post-famine (Orissa famine of 1866, killing nearly 5 million people, one-third of the population), and the dominance of formal writing over spoken tongues. Three academics -- Damayanti Beshra, PhD (recipient of India’s fourth civilian award, “Padma Shri”), Panchanan Mohanty, PhD (noted linguist), and Laxmikanta Tripathy, PhD, DLitt (anthropologist and author) -- also appear in the film to provide contextual commentary on patriarchy, oral history and the sociolinguistic diversity.