North Africa, World War II. British soldiers on the brink of collapse push beyond endurance to struggle up a brutal incline. It's not a military objective. It's The Hill, a manmade instrument of torture, a tower of sand seared by a white-hot sun. And the troops' tormentors are not the enemy, but their own comrades-at-arms.
Charlie Anderson, a farmer in Shenandoah, Virginia, finds himself and his family in the middle of the Civil War he wants nothing to do with. When his youngest boy is taken prisoner by the North, the Civil War is forced upon him.
In the First World War, when Paris is expected to fall to the Germans, the attractive widow, Princesse de Bormes, organises a convoy of cars to evacuate the wounded from the front, and bring them back to her villa in Paris to recuperate. The authorities will not give them passes until an innocent 16-year-old boy, Guillaume Thomas de Fontenoy, joins them and is mistaken as the nephew of the popular General de Fontenoy. The Princess is enraptured by Thomas and her daughter, Henriette, falls in love with him. However Thomas feels impelled to see more of the action of the war.
Volkhov Front in 1942. The young political instructor of the counter-propaganda department of the headquarters of the division Rusanov is torn to the forefront. Together with an experienced warrior — captain Shaternikov — the hero gets to the forefront and transmits from the sound transmission programs addressed to German soldiers. And in the hours of calm passes several kilometers in order to see Katya, the signal woman of a neighboring sector of the front.
During World War II, оld Georgian peasant wine-grower Georgy leaves his Georgian village and goes off to the front line, hoping to find his son. George should see and transfer a lot of things, he becomes a soldier and only in the last days of war finds the son...
October 20, 1944, Belgrade was liberated by Red Army and Tito's partisans. But the capital of Yugoslavia is still fraught with danger - retreating aggressor mined the city . A special partisan squad goes into underground maze of tunnels to find and disarm explosives which are still guarded by SS special forces.
Germany, January 1939: a day in a concentration camp. Subjected to harsh military discipline the hungry prisoners are digging a huge hole and filling it up again. Several are tortured, die of exhaustion, in the electric fence, or are shot.
Allied agents infiltrate the Nazi rocket complex at Peenemunde in order to obtain their secrets and sabotage the plant. The film alternates between German developments of the V-1 missile and V-2 rocket (with a German cast speaking their own language) and discovery by British Intelligence of the weapon.
In Laos, 1954, eight days before the french defeat in the Indochina war, the 317th platoon – four french soldiers and 41 laotian combatants – has been ordered to leave its outpost and to retreat for the plains of Diên Biên Phu, where the french army is getting stucked. Led by the inexperienced and idealistic sous-lieutenant Torrens, fresh out of the military academy, and by adjutant Willsdorf, a WWII veteran of the Werhmacht, the group must cross 150 kilometers of jungle. But dripping rainwater, hostile nature, and the Viêt-minh ambushes expose them to constant danger.
In the Spain of 1939 during the Civil War, a woman searches for her husband who has disappeared, a search that takes her across the border into France.
The year is 1937, just prior to the Japanese invasion of China. Painters Ju Rui and Lao San stumble upon He Hua, a woman sold into the sex industry at a local brothel.