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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
  • The Troubles We've Seen

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    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

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    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, ...

  • 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 (Mohamed Jabaly)

    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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Searching For Gerda Taro

    Directed by Camille Ménager • Documentary • 2021 • 58 minutes

    SEARCHING FOR GERDA TARO celebrates the life and work of Taro — a charismatic Jewish refugee from Germany, an anti-fascist, and a trailblazing photographer whose work would be forgotten for decades.

    In 1935, Taro (then going by her b...

  • Gorbachev. Heaven

    Directed by Vitaly Mansky • Documentary • 2021 • 100 minutes

    GORBACHEV. HEAVEN finds acclaimed director Vitaly Mansky (UNDER THE SUN) at home with a man who helped to shape the 20th-century: Mikhail Gorbachev. 

    The Soviet leader was acclaimed as the architect of Glasnost and Perestroika, polici...

  • Heimat is a Space in Time

    Directed by Thomas Heise • Documentary • 2019 • 218 minutes

    In HEIMAT IS A SPACE IN TIME, German filmmaker Thomas Heise shares the stories of three generations of his family, in their own words.

    Heise sets the tone early, reading an anti-war essay written in 1912 by his grandfather Wilhelm, whe...

  • As a Young Girl of Thirteen...

    Directed by Elisabeth Coronel, Florence Gaillard & Arnaud de Mezamat • Documentary • With Simone Lagrange • 2009 • 88 minutes

    In AS A YOUNG GIRL OF 13, Holocaust survivor Simone Lagrange recounts in detail her life before the war, her deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and her role in bringing N...

  • Antisemitism

    Directed by Ilan Ziv • Documentary • 2022 • 120 minutes

    This documentary masterfully traces the history of anti-Semitism and its effects, from cartoon-like medieval church iconography showing Jews with funnels on their heads, to WWII propaganda comparing Jews to rats and neo-Nazis marching in th...

  • 5 Broken Cameras

    Directed by Guy Davidi & Emad Burnat • Documentary • 2011 • 90 minutes

    An extraordinary work of both cinematic and political activism, 5 Broken Cameras is a deeply personal, first-hand account of non-violent resistance in Bil'in, a West Bank village threatened by encroaching Israeli settlements....

  • Berkeley in the Sixties

    Directed by Mark Kitchell • Documentary • With Ronald Reagan, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mario Savio, Huey Newton, Allen Ginsberg, The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix • 1990 • 117 minutes

    Berkeley in the Sixties recaptures the exhilaration and turmoil of the unprecedented student protests that sha...

  • Blue Helmet

    Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1995 • 25 minutes

    For six months in 1994, François Crémieux served as a French UN peacekeeper near the Bosnian town of Bihać. He never saw combat, barely even experienced physical discomfort—but he was left deeply shaken by the experience.

    In BLUE HELMET...

  • Tadmor

    Directed by Monika Borgmann and Lokman Slim • Documentary • 2016 • 103 minutes

    Amidst the popular uprising in Syria that begin in 2011, a group of former Lebanese detainees of the Assad regime decides to break their long-held silence about the horrific years they spent imprisoned in Tadmor (Palm...