Dedicated to the development of the oil industry of Soviet Azerbaijan in the background of the first half of the twentieth century, including their selfless work in strengthening the economic and military might of the USSR.
Chronicles the little-known story of Allied airmen imprisoned at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp in the waning months of World War II. In the summer of 1944, 168 airmen from the US, England, Canada and other Allied countries were captured in Paris by the German Gestapo and sent to the infamous "Koncentration Lager Buchenwald" in Germany. Falsely accused of being "terrorists and saboteurs," the airmen faced a terrifying fight for survival and a race against time to escape their execution. A controversial moment in history that their home countries tried to hush-up, Lost Airmen of Buchenwald tells this harrowing story through interviews with seven surviving members of the group, including their heroic commanding officer. The film follows them from their days hiding with the French Resistance to the darkest corners of the Holocaust, where they struggled to survive as Germany collapsed under the weight of the advancing Russian and Allied armies
Set in 1912, 'Uisce Beatha' (Gaelic for Whiskey or Water Of Life) is the true story of Tom, a young Irish man who leaves his home in rural Ireland to cross the ocean on the ill-fated 'Titanic'. But a night of celebration beforehand results in a twist that will affect Tom's fate drastically....
Can Liechtenstein maintain prosperity despite relaxation of banking secrecy and the withdrawal of billions of clients' money or is it in danger of falling back into the poverty of past days?
Whatever Comes Next is a documentary about the curious and dynamic life of Annemarie Mahler-Ettinger.
The film portrays the painter and scholar, Annemarie Mahler. Born in Vienna in 1926, Mahler fled by herself as a twelve-year child to the United States and has since 1955 has lived in Bloomington, IN, and in the summers in Woods Hole, MA. The documentary portrays the artist's outer and inner lives, which bridge two centuries and two continents.
A richly lyrical documentary celebration of the vibrant beach life in the North East of England, constructed entirely out of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen's black & white photographs.
200 years ago, the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov was born. The young man with huge eyes: his portrait is known to everyone since school. Lermontov wrote poetry, fought, fell in love, and was killed in a duel. Short life of 27 years. But what do we know about the real Lermontov? Biographical documentary-feature film tells in detail about the life of an outstanding person and a great poet.
Dr. Jose Rizal was exiled in Dapitan from 1892-1896. These were his last four years. Dapitan served as his prison cell. He always compared it to “a beautiful cage” where he is imprisoned. This was the longest imprisonment Rizal ever had. He became so lost by those times, but still he did not lose his mind. Even there, he continued studying and discovering things. He continued his conversation with his friends, scientists and doctors outside the country.
In spite of a longstanding tradition forbidding women from working in a sake brewery, Retsu, a young blind woman, challenges herself to overcome her disability in order to save her family's sake business.
Between 1975 and 1983 a new kind of film could be seen in French cinema: home-grown gay pornography. They were essentially the work of three production companies: Les Films de La Troika (Norbert Terry), AMT Productions (Anne-Marie Tensi) and Les Films du Vertbois (principally Jacques Scandelari). The genre met an untimely end with the advent of video, the last being made in 1983 'Mon Ami, Mon Amour (My Friend, my Lover)'.
The story of the siege and eventual relief of British soldiers garrisoned at Lucknow during the 1857 Indian Rebellion. Only a fragment of the original film remains.
Historical drama centred around the legendary Breton heroine Marion du Faouët who was born Marie-Louise Tromel in 1735 in the little village of Faouët in Brittany. She became the leader of a group of highway robbers.
The story of Josephine Baker takes us on a fascinating tour of 20th-century race relations on both sides of the Atlantic, yet it leads to no conclusion, and black girls in search of a role-model tend to look elsewhere. Part of her appeal is her startlingly unique appearance. Simply nobody has ever looked or acted like her. She fits no black stereotype. Nor does she look like any recognizable strain of Afro-American. I'd always heard she was half-white, but it seems that her paternity is unknown, and her contradictory claims on the subject don't do much to enlighten us. (We are tempted to imagine quite an exotic mix.) Her origins in sharply-segregated St. Louis, where she is said to have witnessed a lynching, do not seem to have left her embittered. Perhaps she had too much to give. There is a special innocence about that smile, and when she performs her cross-eyed gag, we are lifted into a strange pixie-world, all its own.
After the assassination of the Palestinian artist Naji Al-Ali in London in 1987, the film flashes back to the stops that he went through in his life, starting from his displacement with his family to Lebanon, to his work in Kuwait, to his return to Lebanon during the Lebanese civil war.