Assembly (2007)
Every sacrifice deserves to be immortalized.
Genre : Action, History
Runtime : 2H 3M
Director : Feng Xiaogang
Synopsis
Follows a soldier trying to gain recognition for comrades who died in 1948, at a turning point in the civil war between the communists and the nationalist forces of the Kuomintang (KMT).
Men, women, and war. Jelena Panic is a young woman in Belgrade in the early 1990s, during Serbia's war with Croatia; she's making a book of her grandmother's diaries from the end of World War II. She takes up with Bogdan, a young soldier recovering from war wounds. He helps her with her grandmother's story, a tragic triangle involving her effete and well-educated husband and an uneducated major, a Chekist who has, perhaps, the power to save a political prisoner who is the grandmother's friend. As Jelena wonders which man was her grandfather (the Chekist or the husband), Bogdan recovers from his wounds and must decide whether to return to the front. Jelena pleads; duty calls.
When two enemy sides ex-change the captives in the middle of a minefield, a nameless man without identity and memory, subsequently named Jakov, leaves the column unnoticed and wanders around in order to minimize other people's sufferings. On his dangerous journey, he meets a female first-fighter who runs an orphanage, a commander who got back from Foreign legion and runs a defense line from a disco club, and goes through many other adventures only to end up in the endless backwaters of the Neretva river where war threats to arrive.
A transvestite couple from 1990s Belgrade beholds their profession as a pacifistic mission, curbing the urges of rapists, gamblers and horny young men during turbulent periods in war-torn country.
It is El Salvador, 1989, three years before the end of a brutal civil war that took 75,000 lives. Maria Serrano, wife, mother, and guerrilla leader is on the front lines of the battle for her people and her country. With unprecedented access to FMLN guerrilla camps, the filmmakers dramatically chronicle Maria's daily life in the war.
This short-form documentary focuses on the true story of Alfons Heck, who as an impressionable 10-year-old boy became a high-ranking member of the Hitler youth movement during World War II. The story is told in his own words. This film originally aired as part of the "America Undercover" series on HBO.
A film about the historical uprising of the seamen in Kiel: During the Russian October Revolution of 1917, German and Russian soldiers start to solidarize with each other. By disarming the officers, machinist Henne Lonke and stoker Jens Kasten prevent the attack on a Russian freighter. When German admiralty gives out orders for operation "Nibelungen", which would lead the German fleet into a suicidal attack against England and quell the revolutionary spirit, seamen and soldiers from different political backgrounds unite in protest.
A story of three couples and their intertwining love stories set in 1940s Taiwan and Shanghai, centered around the 1949 sinking of Taiping.
During World War II, the propaganda engine of the U.S. government made a pivotal decision with unforeseeable results: they tapped John Huston to shoot war documentaries with an expressly patriotic spin. Few could guess the degree to which Huston's documentaries would depict the sheer brutality and horror of modern warfare - particularly his Let There Be Light and The Battle of San Pietro. The films served (by default) as cinematic protests, even as they graced new and brilliant heights within the scope of American documentary. (Indeed, Light was banned by the government for 35 years). Midge Mackenzie's 1998 documentary John Huston: War Stories explores this little known facet of Huston's career, intercutting clips from the various documentaries with a Huston interview shot just prior to his death.
Il Tempo Dell'Amore (A Time to Love) is an omnibus film of three different love stories that take place in three different eras and locations. The common element is the theme: love causes a lot of pain.
An adaptation of Evgenii Zamiatin’s short story “The Cave,” about a musician dying of hunger in his large, unheated Petersburg apartment because he was not needed in the revolutionary city.
Set amidst the civil war of Algeria in the 1990s, Enough! is the story of two women. Emel is a Westerner whose husband, a journalist, is missing - perhaps kidnapped or even killed for articles he's written.
American journalist gets a sensational material but is afraid to publish it...
Hwa-yeong leaves her middle-class life in Busan to search for the son she lost during the Korean war.
Three film-makers travel to Iraq to film the ongoing crisis in which ISIS forces are trying to take over the country. The film-makers speak with locals, military, police and other media outlets to get their opinions on the crisis but it's the voices of the children which often goes unheard, so the film-makers listen to the children, and find out their views on the crisis.
Animated photographs (made with Jan Lenica) with elements of animated cartoon. A display of military drill.
This feature documentary examines its own genre, which has often been called Canada's national art form. Released in the year of the NFB's 75th birthday, Shameless Propaganda is filmmaker Robert Lower's take on the boldest and most compelling propaganda effort in our history (1939-1945), in which founding NFB Commissioner John Grierson saw the documentary as a "hammer to shape society". All 500 of the films produced by the NFB until 1945 are distilled here for the essence of their message to Canadians. Using only these films and still photos from that era, Lower recreates the picture of Canada they gave us and looks in it for the Canada we know today. What he finds is by turns enlightening, entertaining, and unexpectedly disturbing.
Iraq, 2009. Little Hamoudi (10) is totally obsessed with football. Just as the rest of the world, he and his friends are eagerly looking forward to the Champions League finale FC Barcelona-Manchester United. The long awaited clash between Messi and Ronaldo. But then Hamoudi's television breaks down...
A look at the feud between graffiti artists King Robbo and Banksy.
The film depicts a romance set against the backdrop of the Korean War.
Two grifters, Wang Bo and Wang Li, a couple who've been arguing, board a train in rural China. He wants to fleece a peasant, nicknamed Dumbo for his naiveté, who's carrying 60,000 yuan and trusts everyone. She wants to protect the hick kid, an act of expiation brought on by prayer and a visit to a temple. Also on board are one of more sets of thieves, including a calculating boss and his femme fatale. The boss wants to recruit Wang Bo, and a series of contests ensue, with the potential of turning deadly. While Li guards Dumbo from Bo and the others, can she and Bo sort out their relationship? And can Dumbo's simple spirituality touch anyone else?
Léon, the top hit man in New York, has earned a rep as an effective "cleaner". But when his next-door neighbors are wiped out by a loose-cannon DEA agent, he becomes the unwilling custodian of 12-year-old Mathilda. Before long, Mathilda's thoughts turn to revenge, and she considers following in Léon's footsteps.
In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as "The Basterds" are chosen specifically to spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis. The Basterds, lead by Lt. Aldo Raine soon cross paths with a French-Jewish teenage girl who runs a movie theater in Paris which is targeted by the soldiers.