The film is dedicated to the souls of flight school graduates killed in World War II. Young boys dream about becoming pilots and apply to flight schools. However, the flight schools have extremely demanding, harsh training, and once they finally become pilots, they must become suicide bombers and give their lives for their homeland.
Maria lives with his son Darko in a Croatian village that is attacked by Serbian Chetniks one night. They manage to escape and hide in a nearby town, where Maria takes a job at the laundry and Darko joins the Croatian Defenders, leading to tragedy.
During World War II a young Frenchmen sees his brother killed in Alsace by a German officer. He vows revenge on all Germans, but after the War he is conscripted into the French Army and sent to Indochina. There he meets his brother's killer under strange circumstances.
The deep friendship between young theater actresses Maria and her Jewish friend Lea gradually starts to break as Marias husband Hans goes from being a young adventurer to a high ranking SS officer. But on that day of the Jewish deportations in Munich, Maria comes to a momentous decision which proves what friendship really means to her. She takes on Leas child Charlotte to save her from being deported to the concentration camp, thereby risking her own life and ultimately loosing Hans. Marias story shows that in the end friendship can triumph over terror and death. The film is inspired by the childhood of Charlotte Knobloch, Vice President of the World Jewish Congress and supports our project.
Somewhere in Europe in the twentieth century, a young man decides to change his life by engaging in the army. A modern and quirky tale, with Jérémie Renier and Bernard Le Coq.
If politics were to come back, it could only be from its savage and disreputable fringe. Then, a muffled rumor shall arise whence that roar is heard: "We are scum! We are barbarian!" (Alain Brossat)
Captain Bob Hayworth, his brother Lieutenant Gilroy Hayworth and Captain Derek Marbury are in a World-War 1 trench on the front-lines in France. Bob Hayworth resents Marbury greatly as the latter had married the girl, Lucy Neville, Marbury was courting in pre-war London. Ordered to go on a night patrol, the cowardly Gilroy committed suicide rather than face his fear. Bob and Derek arrange it to appear that Bob had been killed by a shell-burst, and Derek, with his face camouflaged, takes the patrol posing as Gilroy. While on patrol, Derek is hit by a shell-burst and found by the German Red Cross, who turn him over to a family of French peasants.
The story of how a secret agent training school established in Canada during World War Two - and the training manual created specifically for it - laid the foundations for modern espionage in North America and gave birth to the CIA.
Panic arises among Allied POWs aboard a Japanese freighter when they learn that the ship is actually a decoy target for American submarines on night patrol. The prisoners unite and attack their Japanese captors just as an American sub surfaces and, not knowing the prisoners are aboard, prepares to torpedo the ship.
A Serbian hero Mićo Ljubibratić from Herzegovina raises an uprising in eastern Herzegovina against Ottoman and he makes it clear to the Western powers, especially the Austrians, that the annexation of Herzegovina to Austria is out of the question if the newly formed Herzegovinian Assembly does not make such a decision on its own.
The German agent, 503 June Harvey, has caused serious losses to the Danish resistance movement during the occupation, and it is decided to liquidate her. When this is to happen, she is in Stockholm. A new man is sent there to lure her to Denmark, but she prevails over him. The group leader then decides to take care of the matter himself. A young resistance fighter falls in love with her, and it takes great effort for him to carry out the order.
1933 in Germany. The rise of Nazism fears war and some officers, concerned the fate that hostilities would reserve to their country, organize an anti-Nazi group. They send a reporter, Golder, to communicate the plan of the German offensive allies.
The film takes place in a small town where the Germans are getting ready to retreat near the end of the war. But a carload of Russian prisoners get people to feed them, then the prisoners overcome their guards and escape. The town people try to save them from the Germans but do not succeed.
Manipulating a variety of sources, Vasulka uses creative imaging tools to situate historical images against Southwestern landscapes of incredible beauty. Contorting the images into a variety of isomorphic forms, Vasulka creates a literal shape for these memories, developing these shapes as metaphors for the processes of fragmentation, condensation, and inversion, that inevitably contort fact into memory. While much of the raw material for the tape is drawn from World War II and its rehearsals, the Spanish Civil War and the Russian Revolution, The Art of Memory is really an extended meditation seeking to reconcile the blurry, banal photographs of historic figures with the mass destruction they helped engineer.