The City and the City

Erna, Helmut and the Nazis

April 2021 •German

Germany, 1929. Helmut Machemer and Erna Schwalbe fall madly in love and marry in 1932. Everything indicates that a bright future awaits them; but then, in 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rise to power and their lives are suddenly put in danger because of Erna's Jewish ancestry.

The Gestapo: Hitler's Secret Police

December 1991 •English

The rise and fall of Nazi Germany's terrifying secret police force from 1933 through 1945.

Memories of Anne Frank

January 2010 •Italian

Inspirada libremente en el libro (“Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend”) escrito por Alison Leslie Gold. La escritora americana recopiló el largo relato de Hanneli Goslar (una de las amigas más cercanas de Anne Frank) cuarenta años después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. (FILMAFFINITY)

Birthplace

May 1992 •Polish

Henryk Greenberg is a Polish-born American who lost much of his family in the Holocaust. Certain of the location where his father and younger brother were murdered, Greenberg returns to find most of his former neighbors predictably claiming foggy memories at first; but soon their recollections come more easily.

The Last Stage

March 1948 •Polish

Poland, during World War II. Martha Weiss, a Jewish woman, arrives at the Auschwitz extermination camp with her family. She is assigned the role of interpreter, but her loved ones are much less fortunate.

Resistance: They Fought Back

April 2024 •English

We’ve all heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most people have no idea how widespread and prevalent Jewish resistance to Nazi barbarism was. Instead, it’s widely believed “Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.” Filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel, and the U.S., Resistance – They Fought Back provides a much-needed corrective to this myth of Jewish passivity. There were uprisings in ghettos large and small, rebellions in death camps, and thousands of Jews fought Nazis in the forests. Everywhere in Eastern Europe, Jews waged campaigns of non-violent resistance against the Nazis.

Jasenovac

April 1945 •

A documentary short film about the genocide at the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia in World War II.

When Day Breaks

August 2012 •Serbian

The story of a retired music professor, Misha Brankov, who under unusual circumstances discovers his true origins. At the place where once stood a Nazi concentration camp for Jews during World War II, a metal box filled with documents is found. It was buried by an inmate Isaac Weiss in the year 1941. The professor finds out that his real parents, the Weiss's, gave him away to their friends, the Brankovs, just before they were taken into the camp. Inside the box there is an unfinished musical score, called "When day breaks", composed by the inmate Isaac Weiss. Searching for the truth about himself and his origins, Misha discovers the little-known truth about Judenlager Semlin camp, one of the worst Nazi execution sites in the heart of contemporary Belgrade. At the same time, the professor's obsession is to complete the composition, started by his father, and to perform it on the site of the former camp... which he, after many vicissitudes, finally succeeds.

Sun is Sad

January 2015 •French

Holocaust: An Untold Story

July 2022 •English

With the help of a Baptist minister and people abroad, the son of Holocaust survivors unshackles his inherited trauma and reconstructs his future.

Knocking

May 2006 •Polish

Knocking opens the door on Jehovah's Witnesses. They are moral conservatives who stay out of politics and the Culture War, but they won a record number of court cases expanding freedom for everyone. They refuse blood transfusions on religious grounds, but they embrace the science behind bloodless surgery. In Nazi Germany, they could fight for Hitler or go to the concentration camps. They chose the camps. Following two families who stand firm for their controversial and misunderstood Christian faith, KNOCKING reveals how one unlikely religion helped to shape history beyond the doorstep.

Three Minutes: A Lengthening

December 2022 •English

The story of the only three minutes of footage —a home movie shot by David Kurtz in 1938— showing images of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk (Poland) before the beginning of the Shoah.

The Paper Brigade

March 2018 •French

Lithuania, 1941, during World War II. Hundreds of thousands of texts on Jewish culture, stolen by the Germans, are gathered in Vilnius to be classified, either to be stored or to be destroyed. A group of Jewish scholars and writers, commissioned by the invaders to carry out the sorting operations, but reluctant to collaborate and determined to save their legacy, hide many books in the ghetto where they are confined. This is the epic story of the Paper Brigade.

Min farmor och förintelsen

May 2015 •Swedish

Actress Sara Sommerfeld's grandmother survived the holocaust and now Sara visits the places her grandmother were during World War 2.

There Is Many Like Us

May 2015 •English

In 1943, Max Fronenberg spent one year digging a secret underground tunnel to escape out of a prison camp in Warsaw, Poland during the Holocaust while saving fifteen other prisoners in the process and forced to leave behind the love of his life, Rena, in the prison.

Genocide

March 1982 •English

The mass murder of Jewish people by the Nazi regime is chronicled, with a warning that anti-Semitism is on the rise and the events of the Holocaust could happen again. The history of European Jewish culture and events before and during the Holocaust are seen in newsreels, photographs, and animated segments. The words of the victims of the era are read, and footage from the liberation os a concentration camp is shown.

The Driver Is Red

October 2017 •English

Argentina, 1960: a true crime story of how secret agent Zvi Aharoni hunts down one of the highest-ranking Nazi war criminals on the run.

Fire

January 1966 •Polish

A Jewish town is burning. The figures of the dying inhabitants are inscribed in organic sculptures. A male choir sings the 'S’brent, unzer sztetl brent' (Fire, our town is on fire) song by Mordechaj Gebirtig.

Winter Journey

November 2019 •Danish

Tucson, Arizona, September 1996. At the request of his son Martin, George Goldsmith tells him of his past in Nazi Germany as a member of a family of Jewish musicians and the strange history of the Jüdischer Kulturbund, a Jewish organization sponsored by Reichsminister Joseph Goebbels.

Never Forget

April 1991 •English

Mel and Jane Mermelstein are a true-life California couple, thrown into the spotlight of judicial history in the 1980s. Mel is a Hungarian-born Jew, sole-survivor of his family's extermination at Auschwitz, and Jane, a Southern Baptist from Tennessee. Their four children are good kids, typical Americans, with just enough orneriness to irritate each other, but enough love and class to pull together when it counts.