The Bells Go Down (1943)

A POW in World War II is put to work in a Munich zoo, looking after an Asian elephant. The zoo is bombed by the Americans and the director of the zoo decides it is not safe for his Asian elephant Lucy to remain there. So he sends Brooks to safety with Lucy. They escape and go on the run in order to get to Switzerland.

The story of a romantic relationship between a Canadian soldier and a child set in the Netherlands near the end of WWII. Told in flashback from the present day, the child, now a man, is still seeking his lost soldier.

The real-life adventure of a dashing Italian soldier who escapes a British prisoner-of-war camp because he dreams of climbing 17,000-foot Mt. Kenya and planting the Italian flag at the summit. The obsessive British camp commander pursues him, and the two men are locked in a battle of wills, fuelled by honor and their love for the same woman.

While a WW2, RAF squadron leader mourns the death of a comrade, he receives a bombing mission against a secret Nazi V-2 rocket testing facility in France.

Drifting through his gap year with its internships and travel plans, Jack has always suspected there was more to life than this. A chance encounter with the beautiful and ethereal Evelyn swerves his life radically off course.

During the Japanese occupation of China, two prisoners are dumped in a peasant's home in a small town. The owner is bullied into keeping the prisoners until the next New Year, at which time they will be collected. The village leaders convene to interrogate the prisoners. The townspeople then struggle to accommodate the prisoners. One is a bellicose Japanese nationalist, the other a nervous translator. Will the townspeople manage to keep the prisoners until the New Year?

Based on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East of 1946–48, depicts Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo as a family man who fought to defend Japan and Asia from western colonialism but was ultimately hanged by a vengeful United States.

English middle-class family, The Minivers, experience life in the first months of World War II.

Jim Brannigan is sent to London to bring back an American mobster who is being held for extradition but when he arrives he has been kidnapped which was set up by his lawyer. Brannigan in his American Irish way brings American law to the people of Scotland Yard in order to recapture this mobster with both a price tag on his head and a stuffy old London cop to contend with.

An orphan in 18th century London lashes out against the harrowing child labor market.

A newly married WREN, presumed drowned when her ship is torpedoed, spends three years on a tropical island before returning to England to find her husband remarried with a baby son.

Life for the residents of a tower block begins to run out of control.

Stig is a 15-year-old pupil of 37-year-old teacher Viola. He is attracted by her beauty and maturity while she is drawn to him by his youth and innocence, a godsent relief from her drunk and miserable husband.

Through the experiences of two women in Paris and London, Ghost Dance offers an analysis of the complexity of our conceptions of ghosts, memory and the past. The film focuses on the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who observes, 'I think cinema, when it's not boring, is the art of letting ghosts come back.' He also says that 'memory is the past that has never had the form of the present.'

Part of BFI boxset Ration Books and Rabbit Pies: Films from the Home Front.

North Africa, World War II. British soldiers on the brink of collapse push beyond endurance to struggle up a brutal incline. It's not a military objective. It's The Hill, a manmade instrument of torture, a tower of sand seared by a white-hot sun. And the troops' tormentors are not the enemy, but their own comrades-at-arms.

Billy Pilgrim, a veteran of the Second World War, finds himself mysteriously detached from time, so that he is able to travel, without being able to help it, from the days of his childhood to those of his peculiar life on a distant planet called Tralfamadore, passing through his bitter experience as a prisoner of war in the German city of Dresden, over which looms the inevitable shadow of an unspeakable tragedy.

In May of 1941, a group of young army volunteers is recruited in Chumpon south of Bangkok. Many high-school students apply to join the group. When the Japanese army lands at Chumpon in December, they bravely fight against the army. The film is based on the true story of how young army volunteers fought to defend their country from the Japanese Army. A misunderstanding between the two nations caused the unnecessary war to break out.