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
  • 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...

  • 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 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 ...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Afghanistan 1979: The War That Changed the World

    Directed by Gulya Mirzoeva • Documentary • 2014 • 52 minutes

    The Soviet troops' intervention in Afghanistan was a pivotal event in the history of the 20th century. It launched Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

    Soviet troops entered Afghanistan in 1979. This was the war that changed the world. Western cou...

  • Harbour of Hope

    Directed by Magnus Gertten • Documentary • With Irene Krausz-Fainman • 2013 • 76 minutes

    In Spring 1945 Red Cross liberated thousands of concentration camp survivors and rescued them to the Malmö Harbour, Sweden. Among the thousands of survivors brought to Malmö were Irene Krausz-Fainman, Ewa Ka...

  • A Place Called Wahala

    Directed by Jürgen Ellinghaus • Documentary • 2021 • 55 minutes

    Every year the War Cemetery Memorial of Wahala / Chra in Togo (West Africa) hosts the 11th November Remembrance Day Ceremony in memory of the First World War and of the African colonial soldiers who died here in August 1914. The fir...

  • Myanmar Diaries

    Directed by Myanmar Film Collective • Documentary • 2023 • 70 minutes

    MYANMAR DIARIES is comprised of short films by ten young anonymous Burmese filmmakers, combined with emotionally harrowing citizen journalism documenting the junta’s brutality, as well as courageous resistance to it.

    The film...

  • Stray Dog

    Directed by Debra Granik • Documentary • 2016 • 102 minutes

    From Debra Granik, director of the Oscar-nominated 'Winter's Bone', comes this portrait of a motorcycle-riding, freedom-loving, Vietnam veteran cast in the mold of an outlaw biker. But there's much more to burly, bearded Ronnie 'Stray D...

  • Diplomacy

    Directed by Volker Schlöndorff • Drama • With André Dussollier, Niels Arestrup, Burghart Klaußner • 2014 • 85 minutes

    As the Allies march toward Paris in the summer of 1944, Hitler gives orders that the French capital should not fall into enemy hands, or if it does, then ‘only as a field of rubb...

  • 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...

  • Patriot Game
    Movie + 1 extra

    Patriot Game

    Movie + 1 extra

    Rich in emotional images, often tender but more often terrifying, THE PATRIOT GAME tells the story of the long and bitter battle for Northern Ireland.

    The film's introduction covers Ireland's history from British colonization to the territory's division in 1922. THE PATRIOT GAME then details the...

  • Human Terrain

    Directed by James Der Derian, David Udris & Michael Udris • Documentary • 2010 • 84 minutes

    Human Terrain is two stories in one. The first exposes a new Pentagon effort to enlist the best and the brightest in a struggle for hearts and minds. Facing long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. mil...

  • The 3 Rooms of Melancholia

    Directed by Pirjo Honkasalo • Documentary • 2004 • 104 minutes

    An award-winning, stunningly beautiful documentary, THE 3 ROOMS OF MELANCHOLIA looks at how the Russia’s war in Chechnya twenty year ago psychologically affected children both in Chechnya, and in Russia. Divided into three episodes o...

  • Resistance is Life

    Directed by Apo W. Bazidi • Documentary • 2017 • 73 minutes

    From a refugee camp on the Turkish-Syrian border, an 8-year-old girl named Evlin characterizes the resilience of her hometown of Kobane against ISIS militants. In the midst of the tragic war in Syria, Evlin's story provides hope.

  • Pray the Devil Back to Hell

    Directed by Gini Reticker • Documentary • With Janet Johnson Bryant, Etweda Cooper, Vaiba Flomo • 2009 • 72 minutes

    Winner of Best Documentary award at Tribeca Film Festival and Official Section of Sundance Film Festival, "Pray the Devil Back to Hell" chronicles the remarkable story of the coura...

  • The Rock

    Directed by Raúl Santos • Documentary • 2011 • 70 minutes

    In 1969, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, closed the entrance to the British territory of Gibraltar, isolating 30,000 people without food, water, or telephone lines. In his words, “The Rock will fall like ripe fruit.” La Roca is an epic...

  • The Sixth Side of the Pentagon

    Directed by Chris Marker & François Reichenbach • Documentary • 1967 • 26 minutes

    "If the five sides of the pentagon appear impregnable, attack the sixth side."— Zen proverb

    On October 21, 1967, over 100,000 protestors gathered in Washington, D.C., for the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam...