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
  • What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy

    Directed by David Evans • Documentary • 2016 • 92 minutes

    A bracingly rigorous examination of inherited guilt and pain, WHAT OUR FATHERS DID explores the relationship between two men, each of whom are the children of very high-ranking Nazi officials but possess starkly contrasting attitudes towa...

  • Kimjongilia

    Directed by N.C. Heikin • Documentary • 2009 • 75 minutes

    North Korea is one of the world’s most isolated nations. For sixty years, North Koreans have been governed by a totalitarian regime that controls all information entering and leaving the country. A cult of personality surrounds its two re...

  • Stony Paths

    Directed by Arnaud Khayadjanian • Documentary • 2015 • 60 minutes

    Following in his great-grandfather's footsteps, Arnaud Khayadjanian undertakes a long trek across Anatolia to better understand the Armenian Genocide and honor its victims. First-hand accounts from his relatives and an old paintin...

  • Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times

    Directed by John Junkerman • Documentary • 2002 • 74 minutes

    “Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: Stop participating in it.”
    - Noam Chomsky

    Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in our Times gives the public a rare opportunity to see and listen to one of the m...

  • Kigali Shaolin Temple

    Directed by Claire Mollard and Magali Chirouze • Documentary • 2013 • 52 minutes

    Kigali Shaolin Temple is a kung-fu club in Rwanda started by a group of orphans from the genocide. They find fulfillment in passing on their skills and teaching young Rwandans the values of sharing, tolerance and mu...

  • The Stopover

    Directed by Delphine & Muriel Coulin • Drama • With Soko, Ariane Labed, Ginger Romàn • 2016 • 102 minutes

    On their way home from Afghanistan, a band of French soldiers stop in Cyprus for decompression: three days at a sun-splashed resort, where they will undergo intense psychological debriefing....

  • The Troubles We've Seen

    2 items

    One of the most important films of director Marcel Ophüls' career is also his least seen, facing backlash time and time again for its questions about the role of media during crises. Shot primarily in Sarajevo during the 1993 siege, this 230-minute documentary interlaces frontline footage with ca...

  • State of Terrorism

    2 items

    Before September 11, 2001, only some 400 people had pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda. But now there are tens of thousands of jihadist militants on several continents. Terrorist attacks have multiplied around the world, straining relations between the West, its minority populations and Muslim nation...

  • Blowback: The 9/11 Wars in Global Film

    Directed by Terence McSweeney, George Lee • Documentary • 2019 • 30 minutes

    For a huge number of people around the globe the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have become "America's story". Films like the Academy Award-winning The Hurt Locker (2009) and the commercially successful and culturally impa...

  • The German Neighbor

    Directed by Rosario Cervio, Martin Liji • Documentary • With Antonella Saldicco • 2017 • 94 minutes

    Integrating impressive archive material, The German Neighbor follows the steps of Adolf Eichmann’s awkward and unusual life in Argentina and his remarkable defense at the trial in Jerusalem. Rober...

  • Sad Song of Yellow Skin

    Directed by Michael Rubbo • Documentary • 1971 • 58 minutes

    A film about the people of Saigon as seen through the experiences of three young American journalists who, in 1970, explored in their own way the consequences of war and of the American presence. It is not a film about the Vietnam war, ...

  • Mute Fire

    Directed by Federico Atehortúa Arteaga • Documentary • 2019 • 83 minutes

    A family accident leads the director of the film to discover the strange relationship that exists between his mother, the origins of Colombian cinema and recent events of the Colombian armed conflict. On March 6, 1906, four...

  • Maria Luiza

    Directed by Marcelo Diaz • Documentary • With Maria Luiza Da Silva, Gabriel Graça, Sandra Studart, Diáulas Ribeiro, José Augusto Pinto Serrano • 2019 • 80 minutes

    Maria Luiza da Silva is the first transgender in the history of the Brazilian Armed Forces. After 22 years of work in the military, ...

  • Naila and the Uprising

    Directed by Julia Bacha • Documentary • With Naila Ayesh, Jamal Zakout, Roni Ben Efrat • 2017 • 59 minutes

    When a nationwide uprising breaks out in 1987, a woman in Gaza must choose between love, family, and freedom. Undaunted, she embraces all three, joining a clandestine network of women in a ...

  • Sankara's Orphans

    Directed by Géraldine Berger • Documentary • 2022 • 84 minutes

    Thomas Sankara came to power in Burkina Faso in 1983, with the promise of a revolutionary government that would transform the West African country. To help build the revolution, he sent 600 children — many orphans from rural areas — ...

  • Naples '44

    Directed by Francesco Patierno • Documentary • With Benedict Cumberbatch • 2016 • 85 minutes

    In 1943 a young British officer, Norman Lewis, entered a war-torn Naples with the American Fifth Army. Lewis began writing in his notepad everything that happened to him during his one-year stay observin...

  • Do You Remember Vietnam?

    Directed by David I. Munro • Documentary • 2006 • 52 minutes

    In 1978, three years after the fall of Saigon, John Pilger went back to Vietnam to find out what had happened under the new regime.

    He talks with a young tour guide at a war crimes museum, who had been imprisoned in the infamous US ti...

  • Black Sun

    Directed by Rudiger Sunner • Documentary • 2009 • 90 minutes

    For more than sixty years, thousands of historians, political scientists, psychologists and others have attempted to explain the murderous ideology of National Socialism-in particular the theories of its founders Adolf Hitler, Heinrich...

  • Ambulance

    Directed by Mohamed Jabaly • Documentary • 2016 • 78 minutes

    Mohamed, 24, aspires to make films in Gaza City, despite the lack of water, electricity, and closed borders that are part of every ‘normal’ day under the 7-year Israeli blockade of Gaza. While many young people dream of leaving Gaza, M...

  • Le Crabe-Tambour

    Directed by Pierre Schoendoerffer • Drama • With Jean Rochefort, Jacques Perrin, Claude Rich, Jacques Dufilho • 1977 • 120 minutes

    A French naval frigate crosses the Atlantic, bringing supplies and medical care to the French fishing fleet off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. On board are three v...

  • Strange Victory

    Directed by Leo Hurwitz • Documentary • With Alfred Drake, Muriel Smith, Gary Merrill • 1948 • 71 minutes

    The year was 1945. The free world rejoices over the defeat of fascism. But the peace soon chilled, and in the Cold War that followed the United States entered a period of national paranoia a...

  • Codebreaker

    Directed by Clare Beavan, Nic Stacey • Documentary • With Steve Wozniak, Ed Stoppard, Henry Goodman • 2014 • 81 minutes

    "Codebreaker" tells the remarkable and tragic story of one of the 20th century's most important people. Alan Turing set in motion the computer age and his World War II codebrea...

  • And Then We Marched

    Directed by Lynne Sachs • Documentary • 2017 • 4 minutes

    Filmmaker Lynne Sachs shoots Super 8mm film of the first Women’s March in 2017 in Washington, D.C. and intercuts this recent footage with archival material of early 20th Century Suffragists marching for the right to vote, 1960s antiwar act...

  • Far From Vietnam

    Movie

    Initiated and edited by Chris Marker, FAR FROM VIETNAM is an epic 1967 collaboration between cinema greats Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch and Alain Resnais in protest of American military involvement in Vietnam--made, per Marker's narration, "to affirm, by the exercis...