Bitva za Moskvu (1985) Director: Yuri Ozerov Actors: Yakov Tripolsky, Mikhail Ulyanov, Aleksandr Goloborodko Runtime: 358 min Since the preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union started, the capture of Moscow was one of the key military and political objectives of Germany. The invasion (Operation Barbarossa) began on the 22nd of June 1941, and …
Conspiracy (2001) Director: Frank Pierson Actors: Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci Runtime: 96 min In late January of 1942, in Wannsee near Berlin Nazi bureaucrats held a meeting which brought together 15 representatives of different branches of the German state, the army, the SS, the Nazi party and so on. The sole topic of the meeting …
Hotaru no haka (1988) Director: Isao Takahata Runtime: 89 min A tragic story of two Japanese children left on their own in the midst od World War II. In the spring of 1945 U.S. bombers dropped napalm on Kobe, at the time the sixth-largest city in Japan with about one million inhabitants. The firestorm that …
Catch-22 (1970) Director: Mike Nichols Actors: Alan Arkin, Art Garfunkel, Richard Benjamin Runtime: 122 min This anti-war comedy of the absurd attempts to show the defeat of the rational mind in the face of the madness of war. A squadron of U.S. B-25 bombers is deployed on a small Mediterranean island near Italy. The commander …
Shoah (1985) Director: Claude Lanzmann Runtime: 566 min Shoah is the Hebrew term for the Holocaust, the genocide of approximately six million of European Jews conducted by Nazis (and their collaborators) during World War II. It is very difficult to find the words to express or think about the Nazi industry of death. I will …
Chronique des Années de Braise (1975) Director: Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina Actors: Yorgo Voyagis, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, Leila Shenna Runtime: 177 min It is very rare to see colonialism depicted from the perspective of the enslaved. In this great Algerian movie, director Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina succeeded in showing the essence of colonial rule and many aspects of resistance to …
Counter-Intelligence (2013) Director: Scott Noble Runtime: around 330 min Exceptional five-part documentary series which aims to show through in-depth analysis how the current world order, dominated by the USA as an imperial power, is maintained primarily by (public or concealed) organized violence of huge proportions and the threat of violence, destruction, torture and death of …
Everything Is Illuminated (2005) Director: Liev Schreiber Actors: Elijah Wood, Eugene Hutz, Boris Leskin Runtime: 106 min A young Jewish American decides to travel to Ukraine to find out more about his grandfather, one of the very few from his village who survived the Holocaust and saw the end of the war. The journey he …
Le chagrin et la pitié (1969) Director: Marcel Ophüls Runtime: 251 min This two-part documentary analyzes the occupation of France in World War II through the example of a city with a population of approximately 100,000 people. The spirit of the time is quite well conveyed with the use of archive materials, as well as …
The Victors (1963) Director: Carl Foreman Actors: Vince Edwards, Albert Finney, George Hamilton Runtime: 150 min (175?) This movie follows a group of American soldiers through different European battlefields in World War II: Italy, France, Belgium, Germany. It is composed of several short stories that share the same theme and characters, divided by sequences of …
