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
  • Mafioso, Into the Heart of Darkness

    Directed by Mosco Levi Boucault • Documentary • 2022 • 52 minutes

    They claimed to be “men of honour”. In reality, they were killers for the Cosa Nostra (Sicily). Arrested in the early 1990s, they chose to work with the Italian justice and obtained the status of “pentiti” (state witnesses). Three...

  • Scenes from the Labudović Reels

    4 items

    Self-described "artivist" Mila Turajlić mines Yugoslavian newsreel archives to tell a story of international solidarity and resistance to the binary of the Cold War. Focusing on the work of cameraman Stevan Labudović, who traveled the world on Yugoslav "peace missions" and was embedded with Alger...

  • Level Five

    Directed by Chris Marker • Drama • With Catherine Belkhodja, Kenji Tokitsu • 1996 • 106 minutes

    A woman (Laura), a computer, an invisible interlocutor: such is the setup on which LEVEL FIVE is built. She "inherits" a task: to finish writing a video game centered on the Battle of Okinawa—a traged...

  • One Bullet

    Directed by Carol Dysinger • Documentary • 2023 • 92 minutes

    This story of intimate female friendship forged amidst America's longest war is told by a filmmaker who spent fifteen years in and out of Afghanistan. In this war movie, the battlefield lies behind the curtains of an Afghan home as Bib...

  • The Spectre of Boko Haram

    Directed by Cyrielle Raingou • Documentary • 2023 • 75 minutes

    The Far North Region of Cameroon, bordering Nigeria, lives under military protection, threatened by murderous terrorist incursions. In the village of Kolofata, Mohamed, Ibrahim and Falta — indirect victims of Boko Haram — attempt to ...

  • 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 ...

  • The Vow from Hiroshima

    Directed by Susan Strickler • Documentary • 2020 • 77 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...

  • Town Of Glory

    Directed by Dmitry Bogolyubov • Documentary • 2019 • 82 minutes

    With few exceptions, Yelnyans raise their children to become good patriots. They don’t mind the eerie, all-encompassing militarization of society. A heroic Soviet past and a destitute post-industrial present make this provincial tow...

  • 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...

  • Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege

    Directed by Abdallah Al-Khatib • Documentary • 2021 • 89 minutes

    The district of Yarmouk (Damascus, Syria) sheltered the biggest Palestinian refugee camp in the world from 1957 to 2018.

    When the Syrian revolution broke out, the regime of Bashar Al-Assad saw Yarmouk as a refuge of rebels and ...

  • 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...

  • Donga

    Directed by Muhannad Lamin • Documentary • With Ali Sabty • 2023 • 90 minutes

    During Libya's 2011 uprising, young Donga filmed battles, infusing moments of community and humor amidst the war's chaos. Decades later in Istanbul, wounded he grapples with war's grim realities, yet his enduring spiri...

  • Midnight Traveler

    Directed by Hassan Fazili • Documentary • With Hassan Fazili, Fatima Hussaini • 2019 • 88 minutes

    When the Taliban puts a bounty on Afghan director Hassan Fazili’s head, he is forced to flee the country with his wife and two young daughters. Capturing the family’s uncertain journey firsthand, Fa...

  • Kent State: The Day the War Came Home

    Directed by Chris Triffo • Documentary • 2000 • 48 minutes

    This documentary tells the story and haunting legacy of the May 4, 1970 Kent State shootings. The unforgettable photograph of Mary Vecchio poised in anguish over the body of a slain student. The fervor of the wounded student activist sti...

  • Ok, Joe!

    Directed by Philippe Baron • Documentary • 2024 • 52 minutes

    After the landing of the Allied forces in 1944, writer Louis Guilloux was recruited as an interpreter for the American army. He would soon be confronted with the dark side of liberation: the rapes and murders committed by American sold...

  • As If It Were Yesterday

    Directed by Myriam Abramovicz and Esther Hoffenberg • Documentary • 1980 • 84 minutes

    Belgium, 1940. Amidst escalating terror and raids on Jewish residents by the occupying Nazi forces, a resistance movement emerges to shelter Jewish children from deportation and extermination. Myriam Abramowicz...

  • Some Divine Wind

    Directed by Roddy Bogawa • Drama • 1991 • 72 minutes

    SOME DIVINE WIND - a rough translation referring to Japanese Kamikaze pilots (on 'God's wind') - is the story of Ben, an American-born young man of mixed parentage, whose father was part of a bombing mission that destroyed his Japanese mother'...

  • The Tiniest Place

    Directed by Tatiana Huezo • Documentary • 2011 • 104 minutes

    On the surface THE TINIEST PLACE is the story of Cinquera, a village literally wiped off the official map during El Salvador's 12-year civil war. But on a deeper level it is a story about the ability to rise, to rebuild and reinvent on...

  • The Two Lives of Eva

    Directed by Esther Hoffenberg • Documentary • 2006 • 85 minutes

    In this emotionally moving and revelatory documentary, Esther Hoffenberg investigates the early life of her mother, Eva (née Lamprecht), interviewing her friends, relatives and acquaintances, and scrutinizing her mother's tape-recor...

  • Rojek

    Directed by Zaynê Akyol • Documentary • 2023 • 127 minutes

    The Islamic State group consumed the attention of the West for years. They were despised, feared, and by some, embraced. But who were they? Filmed in prisons and detention camps, this engrossing documentary turns the camera on men and wo...

  • Colette and Justin

    Directed by Alain Kassanda • Documentary • 2023 • 89 minutes

    Born in Kinshasa and living in Paris, filmmaker Alain Kassanda embodies the classic immigrant dual identity: in the Democratic Republic of Congo he is seen as French, while in France he is seen as Congolese. Determined to understand th...

  • 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

    3 items

    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...

  • 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 ...