Frédéric Rossif and Philippe Meyer draw the terrible fresco of the Second World War of the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party until his ultimate defeat (1933-1945). While carefully describing the sequence of events, they go back to the genesis of fascism, and the picture they draw from this first half of the twentieth century is both lucid and frightening. A page of history illustrated by a large number of unpublished documents.
Gilberte Montavon was a legend in her own lifetime. As a young woman, she was confidante to hundreds of thousands of Swiss-German speaking soldiers during the First World War, and remembered most of their names. She was still a teenager when the war began, and was immortalised by a song written during the war years by the Swiss-German bard and lute player, Hans Inn der Gand.
The carefree and somewhat idyllic life of a ten year old boy named Marijan is violently interrupted when war ravages his small town of Dalj and his families closest friends and neighbors turn on them purely because they are Croatian. Marijan is forced to witness and experience things an adult would have an incredibly difficult time dealing with. He is nevertheless faced with the inexplicably horrid events war brings out in people. The story centers on a present day Marijan- now the very successful owner of a wood manufacturing business. On one random day a man walks into his store and all of the memories he wishes he could long forget come flooding back, forcing him to relive them. Despite his immense hardships, Marijan lives on in forgiveness, always seeking the positives that lay in the future rather than rehashing and remaining in the past.
On leave in Italy, Lt. Tommy Knowlton falls in love with Jean Standish, who's not only married, but is the daughter of his submarine's commander. Friction between the two officers becomes intolerable once at sea and after Commander Toler is forced to abandon Tommy's best friend topside while the sub dives to escape enemy planes, Tommy is no longer able to contain his anger.
In late 1941, with no hope of relief or re-supply, a small band of United States Marines tries to keep the Japanese Navy from capturing their island base.
Seong Ji-yeon, a female officer of the North Korean army, is discovered by southern forces on a snow covered mountain. She suffers from severe frostbite so she is taken to a military hospital. There she falls in love with a doctor, Captain Lee. However, when he is sent to the front, she is sent to try to survive the hardships of a POW camp.
Ralph Rush, a Scout in General George S. Patton's World War II Intelligence & Reconnaisance Platoons went from digging up German mines to being the first American to enter the Ohrdruf Concentration Camp; the first concentration camp liberated by the Allies.
In 1943, a young sniper joins forces with the underground resistance to help launch a crucial battle against the Japanese army in Haicheng. As deadly sniper duels unfold, a hidden enemy conspiracy is revealed, forcing Chinese soldiers to fight with limited resources and unyielding courage in a brutal fight for survival.
Unknown or forgotten by most Americans, the Korean War divided a people with several millenniums of shared history. Memory of Forgotten War conveys the human costs of military conflict through deeply personal accounts of four Korean American survivors whose experiences and memories embrace the full circle of the war: its outbreak and the day-to-day struggle for survival, separation from family members across the DMZ, the aftermath of a devastated Korean peninsula, and immigration to the United States. Each person reunites with relatives in North Korea conveying beyond words the meaning of four decades of family loss. Their stories belie the notion that war ends for civilians when the guns are silenced and foreshadow the futures of countless others displaced by ongoing military conflict today.
During the war between Iran and Iraq, a group of Iranian Kurd musicians set off on an almost impossible mission. They will try to find Hanareh, a singer with a magic voice who crossed the border and may now be in danger in the Iraqi Kurdistan. As in his previous films, this Kurdish director is again focusing on the oppression of his people.
In 1943, a commando team wants to try to destroy the largest airport of the Germans in Crete. The leader of the commando, Nikitas is Cretan, but Lefteris, who is the leader of the resistance group, refuses to help him. Eventually the mission succeeds, but Nikitas is captured. Then the resistance fighters attack in prison and release the prisoners who were to be executed.