In the fifties, when the future Democratic Republic of Congo was still a Belgian colony, an entire generation of musicians fused traditional African tunes with Afro-Cuban music to create the electrifying Congolese rumba, a style that conquered the entire continent thanks to an infectious rhythm, captivating guitar sounds and smooth vocals.
Numerous films deal with the American Civil War, which raged between the northern Union States and the southern Confederate States from 1861 to 1865. One general who rose to become a war icon and the 18th pres-ident of the United States was Ulysses S. Grant. Director Jim Finn uses board games to reconstruct the battles and documents a divided nation full of rebellious factions.
The true story of King George VI's struggle to overcome his stammer, and the parts played in his battle with his disability by his speech therapist, brother, father and wife.
It is a screen adaption of the cognominal short story of Olha Kobylianska in which the struggle of the educated women with the bourgeois manners is described. Three girls from one family are very interested in the art and are going to devote a lifetime to it. But it is the beginning of the 20th century with all peculiar to that time disadvantages, and the way to the success is bestrewed with the difficulties.
Aleksander Sokurov brings the treasures of the Hermitage back into the light by making films about artists and their paintings. He has chosen the painter Hubert Robert, who spent a long time in Italy, and whose preference was for creating ancient ruined landscapes and naturalistic portrayals of times past. He was successful with the wealthy, who bought his works from him. The camera pans across the paintings while Sokurov speaks of a happy era, when the artist was at one with the spirit of the times, and agreed with the taste of his clients. Just how far removed from us this is, is shown by pictures of a "Nô" performance which are inter-cut on the screen. No words are necessary to describe what everybody knows today.
The year begins with an energy crisis and petrol rationing. And there will be parental insurance so that even fathers can stay at home with their children. Cleaners around Sweden are on strike for better conditions. Worry grows for the Swedish tourists in the holiday paradise of Cyprus. That and much more in this column about the year 1974.
This film is based on the life of Kawashima Yoshiko, originally Manchu princess who was the 14th daughter of Emperor Xu, later brought up as a Japanese and served as a spy in the service of the Japanese Kwantung Army and Manchukuo during the Second World War.
After Turkey’s february 1997 military intervention, Hilal and Fatma left their town to study at university in Istanbul. Feza lives downstairs in their lodgings, has fled as village where was cruelly bullied for being a transgender woman. Hilal chooses to help Feza and Fatma.
The search of several young, white men for blues singers who have been missing for decades coincides with the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi in the 1960s.
Stalags were pocket books whose plots revealed lusty female SS officers sexually abusing camp prisoners. During the 1960s, parallel to the trial held against Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, sales of this pornographic literature broke all records in Israel and hundreds of thousands of copies were sold at kiosks. The popularity of the Stalags only declined after a much-reported trial, in which their authors were accused of distributing anti-Semitic pornography. This film examines the notorious phenomenon, exposing the creators of this genre for the first time. It posits that the combination of pornography and the Holocaust also appears in canonic Holocaust literature and continues to be a widespread part of the representation of the Holocaust in Israel today.
A young man has to find the right words of farewell to his family in a New York pension room in 1942 before his draft sends him off to war, which for him means the possibility of an honorable hero`s death.
An indentured Chinese laborer, brought to Japan to work in a coal mine during WWII, manages to escape his captors. He hides out in the Japanese countryside, so far from human habitation that he does not realize when the war ends, with ultimately tragic results.
