Dutch presenter Astrid Joosten travels the world to find out why Anne Frank's written words in her diary still inspires hope and regardless of own circumstances, works for unity and peace.
Nickys Family is a gripping documentary from the International Emmy Award winning producers Patrik Pass and Matej Minac about a rescue operation of the “British Schindler” - Sir Nicholas\r Winton who will celebrate this year 103rd birthday. His story has no parallel in modern history. Dramatic reenactments, some of the archive footage never seen before, rescued \children\ together with Mr. Winton himself recount this unique story which even after 70 years continues to inspire people, especially children, to make this world a better place. World personalities His Holiness Dalai Lama and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel also took part. ( - from the films press kit)
One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows-Primo Levi. The Oscar®-winning Helen Mirren will introduce audiences to Anne Frank's story through the words in her diary. The set will be her room in the secret refuge in Amsterdam, reconstructed in every detail by set designers from the Piccolo Theatre in Milan. Anne Frank this year would have been 90 years old. Anne's story is intertwined with that of five Holocaust survivors, teenage girls just like her, with the same ideals, the same desire to live: Arianna Szörenyi, Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard, Helga Weiss and sisters Andra and Tatiana Bucci. Their testimonies alternate with those of their children and grandchildren.
A woman’s Holocaust memoir takes the world by storm, but a fallout with her publisher-turned-detective reveals her story as an audacious deception created to hide a darker truth.
When ten-year-old Elliott asks his 90-year-old great-grandfather, Jack, about the number tattooed on his arm, he sparks an intimate conversation about Jack’s life that spans happy memories of childhood in Poland, the loss of his family, surviving Auschwitz and finding a new life in America.
In the spring of 1939, Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus embarked on a risky and unlikely mission. Traveling into the heart of Nazi Germany, they rescued 50 Jewish children from Vienna and brought them to the United States.
Three Canadian Holocaust survivors, with unanswered questions from their past, journey back to hometowns, killing sites, and hiding places in search of clues in this new film. Maxwell wonders what happened to a baby he saved in a forest in 1943. Helen wants to know more about the fate of her brother. Rose wants to honour her mother and father by going to the places where they spent their final days. The survivors who appear in this film came of age during the Holocaust and carry the burden of knowing they are the last living link to it. This film delivers a powerful warning from history, inspiring stories of survival, and a last chance to solve lingering mysteries (88 minutes, English, 2019).
Survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp eloquently and movingly tell of their experiences of deportation, family destruction, and their own survival, together with the history of its place in the Nazi death camp system and its liberation by the British army in April 1945.
The 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann held in an Israeli courtroom and broadcast around the globe, was a benchmark event in the historiography of the Holocaust, especially in Israel where the trial proved a watershed experience for survivors and citizens of the new Jewish state. Employing new video and broadcast technologies, the trial was also a milestone in media and journalism coverage. This absorbing, comprehensive new documentary features detailed accounts of Eichmann's capture, the drama in the courtroom and behind the scenes, and reactions to the trial from around the world.
The Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen trial of 1947/1948 is considered the largest murder trial in history against members of four death squads from the security police and SD (the security service of the SS). During World War II, six million Jews were murdered. Four million died in the extermination camps, but two million people were killed in systematic mass shootings. The perpetrators came face to face with their victims. They shot at men, women, children - day after day, obediently and assiduously, as if it were normal work. Tens of thousands of Germans belonged to the mobile commandos of the task forces and police battalions. Who were these men, how could they commit such murders? What did the few survivors tell, how were they able to escape the mass extinction and live on with the horrific experience? Based on written traditions, original documents, film footage and photos as well as expert statements, the documentary traces the path of one of these murder battalions.
Produced and presented as evidence at the Nuremberg war crimes trial of Hermann Göring and twenty other Nazi leaders, this film consists primarily of dead and surviving prisoners and of facilities used to kill and torture during the World War II.
While Hans Jurgen Höss enjoyed a happy childhood in the family villa at Auschwitz, Jewish prisoner Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was trying to survive the notorious concentration camp. At the heart of this film is the historic and inspiring moment – eight decades later – when the two come face-to-face. This is the first time the descendant of a major war criminal meets a survivor in such a private and intimate setting, Anita’s London living room. Together with their children, Kai Höss and Maya Lasker-Wallfisch, the four protagonists explore their very different hereditary burdens.
Five Jewish Hungarians, now U.S. citizens, tell their stories: before March, 1944, when Nazis began to exterminate Hungarian Jews, months in concentration camps, and visiting childhood homes more than 50 years later. An historian, a Sonderkommando, a doctor who experimented on Auschwitz prisoners, and US soldiers who were part of the liberation in April, 1945.
Award-winning film that tells the story of twelve Romany travelers who survived the genocide on gypsies during World War 2 - a piece of history largely undocumented until now.
An estimated 400,000 people were tattooed with serial numbers at Auschwitz, of whom only a few thousand survive today. This intimate and visually rapturous documentary details the current lives of some of these survivors, their memories of the camps, and their relationships with the numbers. Numbered is an emotionally affecting portrait of memory and history, and their enduring presence in individual lives.
From Steven Spielberg and Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation comes Broken Silence, a series of five films about human courage, heroism, and triumph over intense adversities during World War II. Hell on Earth: Renowned Czech filmmaker Vojtech Jasny directed this Czech-language documentary, a look at Theresienstadt, the model Czech ghetto set up by the Nazis to deceive the world about how well the Jews were treated.
Award-winning filmmaker, Marina Willer (Cartas da Ma~e), creates an impressionistic visual essay as she traces her father’s family journey as one of only twelve Jewish families to survive the Nazi occupation of Prague during World War II. Photographed by Academy Award® nominee Ce´sar Charlone (City of God), the film travels from war-torn Eastern Europe to the color and light of South America and is told through the voice of Willer’s father Alfred (as narrated by Tim Pigott-Smith, Quantum of Solace), who witnessed bureaucratic nightmares, transportations and suicides but survived to build a post-war life as an architect in Brazil. As the world struggles with the current refugee crisis, RED TREES is a timely look at a family besieged by war who finds peace across an ocean.
Documentary about humans dealing with changing technology, the basic concepts of communication, cinema, and Akerman's mother, seen in her Brussels apartment.
Presents the human face of the immigration crisis, following four migrants from Syria, Kenya and Cameroon as they wade through Germany's rigorous immigration process and await the final verdict on their applications for asylum.
A pig farm in Lety, South Bohemia would make an ideal monument to collaboration and indifference, says writer and journalist Markus Pape. Most of those appearing in this documentary filmed in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, France, Germany and Croatia have personal experience of the indifference to the genocide of the Roma. Many of them experienced the Holocaust as children, and their distorted memories have earned them distrust and ridicule. Continuing racism and anti-Roma sentiment is illustrated among other matters by how contemporary society looks after the locations where the murders occurred. However, this documentary film essay focuses mainly on the survivors, who share with viewers their indelible traumas, their hole in the head.
From the imposing mating call of the red deer and the flight of the buzzard to the hunt of the fox and the micro-ecosystem on a massive oak: nature documentarist Luc Enting recorded it all for his stunning feature film Wild Heart of Holland, produced by PVPictures. The result of his efforts is an exciting, moving and often humorous film, revealing the beauty and diversity of this wild park in every season. We also watch the main characters grow up to adulthood, a path inevitably dogged with challenges. Enting: “To me, this park, in any season, has an almost un-Dutch beauty. It is the largest continuous nature reserve in northwest Europe with an incredible variety of landscapes and life. It has forests, heath, sand drifts, brooks and pushed moraines. With my film, I would like to give a new insight into its incredibly diverse nature.”
Tom Fassaert (Naarden, 1979) has been fascinated by his grandmother Marianne, who lives in South Africa, from an early age. His only knowledge of her comes from the mythical – and in the main negative – stories he heard from his father. She was a femme fatale who went through countless men; and in the 1950s, a famous model who put her two sons into a children’s home. She was also a mother who suddenly decided out of the blue to emigrate to South Africa, far away from the rest of her family. When his father and his now 95-year-old grandmother again become embroiled in conflict, Fassaert’s fascination with his family history is reignited. During this period, his grandmother also asks him to come to South Africa to help her with her will. He decides to make a film about this woman, who has such a huge influence on her family, and to get to the bottom of the enduring myths and legends surrounding her. But his venture quickly becomes way more complicated than he could ever have imagined.
Josef Ganz, editor of trade journal Motor-Kritik, amazed Germany by appearing in a revolutionary tiny car in 1932. It was his dream: a people's car anyone can afford. The idea made its way to new Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler. But in Hitler's dream there was no place for Jewish inventor Ganz. This is the story of the man whose designs led to the invention of the Volkswagen Beetle, and who ultimately lost everything. In the film, Ganz's relatives and admirers bring his lost heritage back to life.
What happens when director Ruud Lenssen's father is told he suffers from dementia? While Jac clings to his idyllic meadow, mother Ria struggles with her role as a caregiver. In the meantime, the inevitable farewell is closing in.
A documentary in which after being released from prison, former criminal Viggo wonders why he developed from a sensitive little boy into a merciless criminal. He decides to give up his criminal existence for good and dives into his past to avoid making the very same mistakes a second time. Viggo realizes that the damage he suffered because of his family might jeopardize his new life. His quest, in which he drags his two sister, leads to painful confrontations with their past and also with one another. The secrets of their incestuous family and manipulative father are unraveled little by little.
Erbarme dich - Matthäus Passion Stories is a labyrinthine narrative in which notables such as Peter Sellars, Emio Greco, Simon Halsey and painter Rinke Nijburg explain their special relationship with Bach’s St Matthew Passion to Ramón Gieling (Johan Cruijff: en un momento dado). They speak against the backdrop of a church which has fallen into disrepair, while a choir of homeless people and Pieter Jan Leusink’s Bach Choir & Orchestra rehearse the Passion. Leusink isn't just the conductor, he is one of the main characters himself, with a painful past in which this musical piece has played a dominant role. Stories from the others alternate seamlessly with this. We learn how the St Matthew Passion played a decisive role in the relations between men and women, fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, mothers and their unborn children, and finally that in spite of our differences we all find a common denominator in the secret of Bach's music.
Although scientists and agribusiness have started touting edible insects as the future of sustainable food, the notion of eating bugs hasn’t exactly gained much popularity among the general public. Head Chef Ben Reade and Lead Researcher Josh Evans from the Nordic Food Lab in Denmark are looking to change that. With a focus on food diversity and deliciousness, they set out on a globe-trotting mission to take on the politics of the palate, sampling grubs in the Australian outback, pillaging giant wasp nests in Japan and attending food expos where entrepreneurs pitch their flavorless farmed crickets. Along the way, they put their own haute cuisine spin on local insect delicacies, whipping up dishes like cricket and grasshopper ravioli, maggot cheese gelato and bee larva ceviche.
