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War & Peace

War & Peace

As we try to push war away into history its routine horrors assail us, and its dirty secrets disempower us again and again. But these fllms go deeper, through essay, and archive documentary, and fiction, into wars that history books have already misunderstood for us — and those wars erupting daily on the too-often unseen street corners near and far…From Robert Kramer’s 1969 classic ICE, to untold stories of anti-war activism and long-term pacifist struggle in Anand Patwhardan’s WAR AND PEACE and Erlich and Tejada-Flores’ THE GOOD WAR, through to Ruddier Sunner’s powerful analysis of Nazi ideology BLACK SUN, here is war and peace seen by visionary filmmakers such as Claude Chabrol, Shohei Immamura, Joris Ivens, Chris Marker, Lynne Sachs, and Marcel Ophuls.

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War & Peace
  • I Am Become Death: They Made the Bomb

    Directed by Arthur MacCaig • Documentary • 1995 • 55 minutes

    On July 16, 1945 at 5.30 a.m., in a remote site in the New Mexico desert, America successfully detonates its first atomic bomb. In El Paso, Texas, one hundred miles away, the city's residents are awakened by a silent but blinding light...

  • Nobuhiko Obayashi's War Trilogy

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    In the last decade of his long and prolific career, Nobuhiko Obayashi (1938-2020) —best-known in the U.S. as the filmmaker behind the cult hit House (1977)—wrote and directed a trio of deeply personal and formally audacious films that confronted Japan’s wartime past.

    Made in the wake of the Grea...

  • Hitler - A Career

    Directed by Joachim Fest • Documentary • With Stephen Murray (narrator) • 1977 • 150 minutes

    "Hitler - A Career" is Joachim Fest's controversial German documentary film about the inevitability of Hitler and Fascism within Germany. Narrated by Stephen Murray, it tells the story of Hitler's rise t...

  • 1914: A War of Images

    Directed by Günter Kaindlstorfer • Documentary • 2014 • 45 minutes

    World War I was the battlefield for the first propaganda war in history. The recently invented and very popular medium of film was used by all military parties to create deception and manipulate public opinion. Scientists, using ...

  • The Ritchie Boys

    Directed by Christian Bauer • Documentary • 2004 • 90 minutes

    The Ritchie Boys is the riveting, untold story of a group of young men who fled Nazi Germany and returned as soldiers in U.S. uniforms. They knew the psychology and the language of the enemy better than anyone. In Camp Ritchie, Maryla...

  • The Eye of Vichy

    Directed by Claude Chabrol • Documentary • With Brian Cox, Maquisard Alfonso, General Bergeret, Jean Bichelonne, Maquisard Boczov, Pierre Boisson • 1993 • 110 minutes

    The Eye of Vichy is a brilliantly chosen compilation of long forgotten film footage and newsreels produced by the Nazis and Frenc...

  • The Vow from Hiroshima

    Directed by Susan Strickler • Documentary • 2020 • 82 minutes

    THE VOW FROM HIROSHIMA is an intimate portrait of Setsuko Thurlow, a passionate, 85-year-old survivor of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. Her moving story is told through the lens of her growing friendship with a second generation surviv...

  • The Bomb

    Directed by Kevin Ford, Smriti Keshari, Eric Schlosser • Documentary • 2016 • 61 minutes

    Over seven decades have passed since a city was destroyed by a nuclear weapon. But the danger never went away. We are now confronted with a world in which nine nations possess about 15,000 nuclear weapons. M...

  • Eastern Front

    Directed by Vitaly Mansky and Yevhen Titarenko • Documentary • 2023 • 98 minutes

    On February 24, 2022, Yevhen Titarenko didn’t have to puzzle over what he should do. He went to the front. And from the first minute of Russia’s large-scale aggression against Ukraine, he began to record everything ...

  • Beyond Zero: 1914-1918

    Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • 2014 • 40 minutes

    A prismatic and cinematic a message in a bottle from a century ago and accompanied by a magnificent score by Aleksandra Vrebalov performed by the Kronos Quartet, BEYOND ZERO: 1914-1918 is a powerful record of wartime past. Out on the sa...

  • War and Peace

    Directed by Anand Patwardhan • Documentary • 2002 • 135 minutes

    Filmed over four tumultuous years in India, Pakistan, Japan and the USA following nuclear tests in the Indian sub-continent, War and Peace is a documentary journey of peace activism in the face of global militarism and war. The film...

  • The Marines

    Directed by François Reichenbach • Documentary • 1957 • 21 minutes

    François Reichenbach follows a group of young men from the day they enlist in the US Marine Corps, all the way through basic training. The power of this is twofold. It lies in the poetic visuals focused on the men’s faces and exp...

  • Combat Obscura

    Directed by Miles Lagoze • Documentary • 2019 • 70 minutes

    Just out of high school, at the age of 18, Miles Lagoze enlisted in the Marine Corps. He was deployed to Afghanistan where he served as Combat Camera — his unit's official videographer, tasked with shooting and editing footage for the Co...

  • Django

    Directed by Etienne Comar • Drama • With Reda Kateb, Cécile de France • 2017 • 117 minutes

    During the German Occupation, gypsy Django Reinhardt, a true hero of the guitar, is at the peak of his career. Every night he has Paris reeling to his swing music at the Folies Bergères, while his gypsy br...

  • Sophie Scholl: The Final Days

    Directed by Marc Rothemund • Drama • With Julia Jentsch • 2005 • 117 minutes

    The true story of Germany’s most famous anti-Nazi heroine is brought to thrilling life in the multi-award winning drama Sophie Scholl-The Final Days. Academy Award Nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, Sophie Scholl s...

  • Heart of Stone

    Directed by Claire Billet, Olivier Jobard • Documentary • 2018 • 89 minutes

    Thirteen-year-old Ghorban arrives in Paris after having made the 8,000 kilometre journey from Afghanistan on his own. In France, however, he is faced with an absurd situation: He’s stuck. “There is neither a beginning no...

  • Sir! No Sir!

    Directed by David Zeiger • Documentary • 2006 • 84 minutes

    In the 1960's an anti-war movement emerged that altered the course of history. This movement didn't take place on college campuses, but in barracks and on aircraft carriers. It flourished in army stockades, navy brigs and in the dingy to...

  • Shusenjo: Comfort Women and Japan's War on History

    Directed by Miki Dezaki • Documentary • 2019 • 120 minutes

    One of the most heated issues in Japan and Asia today is over something that occurred 80 years ago: the Japanese Imperial Army's sexual enslavement of an estimated tens of thousands of Korean women and others in military brothels during ...

  • The Messenger

    Directed by Oren Moverman • Drama • With Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson, Samantha Morton, Steve Buscemi • 2009 • 113 minutes

    Co-written by Oren Moverman and Alessandro Camon, THE MESSENGER is a powerful and tender story about a returned war hero making his first steps toward a normal life. In his f...

  • The Apology

    Directed by Tiffany Hsiung • Documentary • 2016 • 104 minutes

    THE APOLOGY follows the personal journeys of three former 'comfort women' who were among the 200,000 girls and young women kidnapped and forced into military sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II.

    Some 70 ...

  • Memoir of War

    Directed by Emmanuel Finkiel • Drama • With Mélanie Thierry • 2018 • 127 minutes

    In Emmanuel Finkiel’s haunting adaptation of Marguerite Duras’s semi- autobiographical novel, The War: A Memoir, the famed author (Mélanie Thierry) recounts an emotionally complex story of love, loss, and perseveran...

  • Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story

    Directed by Garrett Scott • Documentary • 2001 • 57 minutes

    In May 1995, Shawn Nelson, a 35 year-old plumber from Clairemont, California, emerged from an eighteen foot mine shaft he had dug beneath his backyard in search for gold. An ex-soldier and methamphetamine abuser, he stole a tank from a ...

  • Winter Soldier

    Directed by Winterfilm Collective • Documentary • With John Kerry • 1972 • 96 minutes

    In February 1971, one month after the revelations of the My Lai massacre, a public inquiry into war crimes committed by American forces in Vietnam was held at a Howard Johnson motel in Detroit. The Vietnam Vete...

  • The 317th Platoon

    Directed by Pierre Schoendoerffer • Drama • With Jacques Perrin, Bruno Cremer, Pierre Fabre • 1965 • 95 minutes

    1954. The dying days of the French war in Indochina. As the battle of Diên Biên Phu rages, the 317th platoon of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps are ordered to destroy their bas...