World War II
OVID's unrivaled collection of WWII documentaries features Hotel Terminus: The Life And Times Of Klaus Barbie by Marcel Ophüls, a brilliant Academy Award-winning examination of the Nazi SS officer. Mosco Boucault's Terrorists in Retirement, too controversial to be shown on French TV when first released, was highly praised by Richard Brody in The New Yorker: "Extraordinary. Audacious, passionate, and exalted... One of the great films about the Holocaust." Other highlights include Black Sun by Rudiger Sunner, which sheds new light on the sources of Nazi ideology by examining its occult roots in the world of myths, symbols, and fantasies.
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Pastorale 1943
Directed by Wim Verstappen • Drama • With Pim de la Parra, Rutger Hauer • 1978 • 128 minutes
Submitted for the 1978 Academy Awards -- Best Foreign Film, Wim Verstappen's Pastorale 1943 is a war drama centered on the Dutch resistance during World War II, starring Derek de Lint, Sylvia Kristel, Ru...
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900 Days
Directed by Jessica Gorter • Documentary • 2011 • 77 minutes
Jessica Gorter's 900 DAYS contrasts the devastating and unforgettable stories recounted by survivors of the Siege of Leningrad, the infamous German blockade, which caused the deaths of more than 1 million people during World War II, wi...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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The Champagne Safari
Directed by George Ungar • Documentary • 1995 • 94 minutes
What was a reputed Nazi collaborator doing reconnoitering the Canadian Northwest in 1934? In that year, mogul Charles Bedaux embarked on an ill-fated journey across through the Canadian Rockies. His upper-crust caravan, called "The Champ...
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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 ...
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Churchill's Island
Directed by Stuart Legg • Documentary • With Lorne Greene • 1941 • 22 minutes
Winner of the first Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject! It presents the strategy of the Battle of Britain, showing with penetrating clarity the relationships between the various forces made up the island's defens...
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A Diary for Timothy (Humphrey Jennings)
Directed by Humphrey Jennings • Documentary • 1946 • 38 minutes
A diary for the first six months in the life of a baby born 3rd September 1944, illustrating events and daily life during this period of the war. Directed by Humphrey Jennings.
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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...
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A Film Unfinished
Directed by Yael Hersonski • Documentary • 2010 • 90 minutes
This potent documentary uses a long-lost film reel to illustrate how the Nazis controlled images of Jewish life during World War II. Though the Nazis made a propaganda movie of contented Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, the missing spool exp...
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Forgiving Dr. Mengele
Directed by Bob Hercules & Cheri Pugh • Documentary • With Eva Mozes Kor, Sami Adwan, Dan Bar-On, Michael Berenbaum, Albert H. Friedlander • 2007 • 82 minutes
Eva Kor and her twin sister were victims of the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who conducted sadistic experiments on human beings at...
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Francofonia (Alexander Sokurov)
Directed by Alexander Sokurov • Documentary • With Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Benjamin Utzerath, Vincent Nemeth • 2016 • 87 minutes
Set against the backdrop of the Louvre Museum’s history and artworks, master director Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark) applies his uniquely personal vision onto stage...
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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...
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The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It
Directed by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Tejada-Flores • Documentary • With Ed Asner • 2002 • 57 minutes
Millions of people from Allied countries fought to liberate Europe from Hitler’s grip during World War II . Yet 40,000 Americans refused to shoulder weapons in “the good war.”
Narrated by Ed Asn...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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The Hitler Chronicles
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Mixing political fatigue with populist theses, post-factual arguments and lies, along with emotional appeals ridiculing democratic processes and defaming opponents is not new. Seeing signs repeat themselves is a disturbing experience with a clear political statement and society needs to act again...
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Hotel Terminus: The Life And Times Of Klaus Barbie (Marcel Ophüls)
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Directed by Marcel Ophüls • Documentary • With Klaus Barbie, Claude Lanzmann, Marcel Ophüls • 1988 • 267 minutes
A brilliant and epic Academy Award-winning examination of the Nazi SS officer Klaus Barbie, the infamous "Butcher of Lyon", HOTEL TERMINUS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF KLAUS BARBIE weaves t...
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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...
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Imaginary Feasts
Directed by Anne Georget • Documentary • 2014 • 70 minutes
IMAGINARY FEASTS explores how in Nazi concentration cmaps, Soviet Gulags and Japanese prison camps, starving prisoners shared and recorded favorite meals and recipes. By examing how these objects of survival, the film shows quiet acts of...