American Reds: The Failed Revolution (2016)
Genre : Documentary, History
Runtime : 1H 25M
Director : Richard Wormser
Synopsis
The documentary AMERICAN REDS provides a historical overview of 20th century Communism and the growth, decline and contemporary relevance of the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA). Since its founding in 1919, the CPUSA has championed the struggles for democracy, labor rights, women’s equality, and racial justice. During its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s, it attracted millions of Americans to support its causes and almost 100,000 men and women to enlist in its ranks. The film begins with the Party's emergence as a small militant sect in the 1920s and documents its rise to the foremost radical group in the United States during the Great Depression, fighting against racism, sexism and fascism, as well as for the rights of workers to organize. It ends with the decline of the Party during the Cold War under the assaults of the FBI and anti- communist crusades.
In 1984 East Berlin, an agent of the secret police, conducting surveillance on a writer and his lover, finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives.
At the dawn of WWII, several men escape from a Russian gulag—to take a perilous and uncertain journey to freedom as they cross deserts, mountains and several nations.
A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.
In 1987 Korea, under an oppressive military regime, a college student gets killed during a police interrogation involving torture. Government of officials are quick to cover up the death and order the body to be cremated. A prosecutor who is supposed to sign the cremation release, raises questions about a 21-year-old kid dying of a heart attack, and he begins looking into the case for truth. Despite a systematic attempt to silence everyone involved in the case, the truth gets out, causing an eruption of public outrage.
Three elite North Korean sleeper agents live under cover for so long that they believe their cover stories are their real identities. They are shocked when they are ordered to kill one another or face death at the hands of an elite hit team.
The career of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo is halted by a witch hunt in the late 1940s when he defies the anti-communist HUAC committee and is blacklisted.
Two college roommates have 24 hours to make the ultimate choice as they finalize arrangements for a black market abortion.
Vixen lives in a Canadian mountain resort with her naive pilot husband. While he's away flying in tourists, she gets it on with practically everybody including a husband and his wife, and even her biker brother. She is openly racist, and she makes it clear that she won't do the wild thing with her brother's biker friend, who is black.
The epic tale of a class struggle in twentieth century Italy, as seen through the eyes of two childhood friends on opposing sides.
Successful surgeon Tomas leaves Prague for an operation, meets a young photographer named Tereza, and brings her back with him. Tereza is surprised to learn that Tomas is already having an affair with the bohemian Sabina, but when the Soviet invasion occurs, all three flee to Switzerland. Sabina begins an affair, Tom continues womanizing, and Tereza, disgusted, returns to Czechoslovakia. Realizing his mistake, Tomas decides to chase after her.
Giuseppe Tornatore traces three generations of a Sicilian family in in the Sicilian town of Bagheria (known as Baarìa in the local Sicilian dialect), from the 1930s to the 1980s, to tell the story of the loves, dreams and delusions of an unusual community.
In an English boys' boarding school, social hierarchy reigns supreme and power remains in the hands of distanced and ineffectual teachers and callously vicious prefects in the Upper Sixth. But three Lower Sixth students, leader Mick Travis, Wallace and Johnny decide on a shocking course of action to redress the balance of privilege once and for all.
A small group of French students are studying Mao, trying to find out their position in the world and how to change the world to a Maoistic community using terrorism.
Accio and Manrico are two working-class brothers in 1960s Italy: older Manrico is handsome, charismatic, womanizing, and loved by all, while younger Accio is moody, hotheaded, and lives everything as if it was a war, much to his parents' chagrin. When the former is drawn into left-wing politics, Accio joins the fascists out of spite. His flimsy beliefs are put to test when he meets Manrico's like-minded girlfriend, falling in love with her.
Based on the true story of a Russian serial killer who, over many years, claimed victim to over 50 people. His victims were mostly under the age of 17. In what was then a communists state, the police investigations were hampered by bureaucracy, incompetence and those in power. The story is told from the viewpoint of the detective in charge of the case.
At the age of 11, Li was plucked from a poor Chinese village by Madame Mao's cultural delegates and taken to Beijing to study ballet. In 1979, during a cultural exchange to Texas, he fell in love with an American woman. Two years later, he managed to defect and went on to perform as a principal dancer for the Houston Ballet and as a principal artist with the Australian Ballet.
After a fictitious marriage with a Russian emigrant, Cellisten Louka, a Czech man, must suddenly take responsibility for her son. However, it’s not long before the communication barrier is broken between the two new family members.
A cashier poses as a writer for blacklisted talents to submit their work through, but the injustice around him pushes him to take a stand.
In a village of the Po valley where the earth is hard and life miserly, the priest and the communist mayor are always fighting to be the head of the community. If in secret, they admired and liked each other, politics still divided them as it is dividing the country. And when the mayor wants his "People's House"; the priest wants his "Garden City" for the poor. Division exist between the richest and the poorest, the pious and the atheists and even between lovers. But if the people are hard as the country, they are good in the bottom of there heart.
Michele is a Communist MP who loses his memory in a car crash—although nobody seems to notice. Over the course of a water polo match ahead of election day, he starts to remember his past life, revealing the picture of a man whose personal and political identity crisis mirrors the one of Italian communism.
