We are with Pasolini during the last hours of his life, as he talks with his beloved family and friends, writes, gives a brutally honest interview, shares a meal with Ninetto Davoli, and cruises for the roughest rough trade in his gun-metal gray Alfa Romeo. Over the course of the action, Pasolini’s life and his art are constantly refracted and intermingled to the point where they become one.
March 9th, 1953, 5 million people attend Stalin’s funeral. A revolutionary lacking in both charisma and stature, Stalin came to power almost by chance, and his 30-year reign saw him become the most Machiavellian and bloodthirsty of dictators. The man who insisted on being called “The Father of the People” massacred his own countrymen, and was responsible for the death of some 20 million people. Soon forgetting his former ideological stance, he mercilessly crushed anyone who opposed him, in both word and deed. His camps for reform through hard labor – known as “gulags” – turned 18 million Russians into slaves. He not only murdered his opponents but his best friends too, and even sometimes members of his own family. His cruelty knew no bounds. Through colorized archive material rich in previously unseen footage, and many accounts from the period including some from Stalin himself, this documentary tells the story of a man who turned a dream into a nightmare.
At Sakurada Gate in 1860, the shogun’s chief minister and his retinue of bodyguards are ambushed and annihilated. Bearing the responsibility and shame for this failure is Shimura Kingo, master swordsman and chief of the guard. Forbidden to take his own life in atonement, he is instead tasked with hunting down the remaining assassins; however, fate intervenes and now only one is left. Devoted to his late lord and his duty, he relentlessly pursues the sole remaining assassin for the next thirteen years. But times are changing in Japan and the way of the sword has become outlawed. What does this mean for Kingo?
Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini's lover and advisor, was a woman who exerted a great influence on the Duce and on Italian cultural life. Through archival documents, autobiographical texts and love letters, the documentary paints a portrait of the woman who helped create the myth of the Duce.
A remake in part of his earlier "comfort women" film (Comfort Women, 1994), which explored the exploitation of various Chinese women forced to provide ‘entertainment’ for the Japanese army during their occupation of China.
Slovak musicologist Agata Schindlerová, now settled in Dresden, has spent years mapping out the forgotten destinies of Jewish musicians whose lives were irrevocably marked by the advance of nazism. Scenes from the lives of several of them are portrayed in the film In Silence (ballet dancer Alice Flachová, pianist and conductor Karol Ebert, composer, conductor and director of the Dresden Theatre Arthur Chitz, pianist Edith Kraus, and the vocal ensemble Comedian Harmonists), which draws a sharp contrast between the protagonists’ carefree existence working and making music during the pre-war era and the subsequent severe upheaval in their lives brought on by the proliferation of nazism.
In the spring of 1789, France is devastated by famine. The French people begin to rise in unrest against the ruling French king Louis XVI. Ronan, a young peasant, leads a revolt marching to Paris, where he encounters Olympe, an assistant governess of the children of Marie Antoinette of Austria. The two fall in love during the tumultuous stirrings of the French Revolution, their romance playing out amid encounters with major Revolutionary figures such as Georges Jacques Danton, Maximilien de Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins. After they are separated, Ronan and Olympe find each other again on 14 July 1789 in the course of the assault on the Bastille prison— an encounter that seals their destiny even as a new era begins.
This is Adolf Hitler as we’ve never seen him before — through the eyes of his mistress, Eva Braun. From 1937 to 1944, Braun shot a series of remarkable amateur movies that take us into the inner sanctum of the Third Reich — Hitler’s chalet, the Berghof, the veritable decision center of the Nazi regime.
Macedonia is a small country, in the heart of the Balkans, which for five centuries was under the yoke of the Ottoman Empire. The action of the film "To the Hilt" takes place in the years of the general collapse and "free fall", after the Macedonian uprising of 1903 which was extinguished in blood. The story is a love quadrangle between an uncompromising idealist rebel, a merciless Turkish officer, an opportunist rich man's son returning home after his studies in Europe and a lucid and open minded European woman, who flirts with the three men and puts in train a series of events with dire consequences, that she could hardly imagine. The film is a harsh and romantic story in which the eternal Macedonian cause for own identity and independence is seen through the prism of relativity of the ideas of freedom, justice, love, sacrifice, and treason.
A story about a group of Austria-Hungarian soldiers in the 1st World War. They hold an artillery post in the mountains on the southern front to Italy. The group is cut off from their own troops and under heavy artillery fire from the Italian. When the post receives a fatal direct hit from a shell, killing the comrades, private Jacob Lindner and the seriously injured captain Jan Kopetzky are the only survivors of the post. Jakob has to suffer the madness of this hellish war in all its human atrocities. Without care, help from the command, food and water, to survive becomes an existential challenge. The young soldier tries desperately with humanity and dignity to save his and the injured captains life.
The film is based on Francesc de Castellví's pharaonic work "Narraciones históricas", about the War of Succession, and features journalist Mònica Terribas as narrator.
The tragedy and comedy in Carlos' life begins, grows and ends like the tragedy and comedy of Portugal. In the company of his close friend, João da Ega, allegedly a brilliant writer, Carlos, with his idle existence as an aristocratic doctor, spends his time to enjoying friends and lovers. Until he falls in love. She is a new character in this revolutionary novel. It's a vertiginous passion that goes beyond that past gloominess to reach a new and darker abyss, incest.
While tattoos can be found on people in almost every country in the world, few know the history behind this ancient form of body modification. Part of this tale traveled on the arms of sailors from the islands of the South Pacific to Europe and beyond.
To celebrate its 250th anniversary, this documentary tells the story of one of the world’s greatest museums, from its foundation by Catherine the Great, though to its status today as a breathtakingly beautiful complex which includes the Winter Palace. Showcasing a vast collection of the world’s greatest artworks together with contemporary art galleries and exhibitions, it holds over 3 million treasures and world class masterpieces in stunning architectural settings. This is its journey from Imperial Palace to State Museum, encompassing a sometimes troubled past, surviving both the Revolution in 1916 and the siege of Leningrad by the Nazis in 1941-44.