
2025

Bertolt Brecht asked whether there would be singing in the dark times. In the throes of war, the United Ukrainian Ballet Company defiantly insists there will be dancing, too. Far from the land they call home, young dancers take quiet comfort from art. For a while, their work feels like the old days, except there is a new troupe member: a soldier learning to dance with prosthetic legs.
2024

An in-depth look of the 40 year journey, from post-war Germany to Hollywood royalty, of Hans Zimmer, the man who’s become the dominant force in the world of movie soundtracks. His film credits include The Lion King, Rain Man, Pirates of The Caribbean, Gladiator, The Dark Knight Trilogy, 12 Year A Slave, The Thin Red Line, The Da Vinci Code and Dune.
2022

A prolific composer and one of the most celebrated poets in Brazilian music, Paulo César Pinheiro is the author of Canto das Três Raças and O Poder da Criação, among other samba, samba-enredo and song classics. Partner of Baden Powell, Tom Jobim and Edu Lobo, was created by Elis Regina, Clara Nunes and Maria Bethânia. Here, sitting on his couch, he reflects on human nature and leads a journey that evokes and involves big names in MPB, covering half a century of music, from the height of the festival era to the period of protest songs against the military dictatorship.
2021

The armies of Fascist Italy conquered Addis Ababa, capital of Abyssinia, in May 1936, thus culminating the African colonial adventure of the ruthless dictator Benito Mussolini, by then lord of Libya, Eritrea and Somalia; a bloody and tragic story told through the naive drawings of Pietro Dall'Igna, an Italian schoolboy born in 1925.
2020

2020

September 1st, 1939. Nazi Germany invades Poland. The campaign is fast, cruel and ruthless. In these circumstances, how is it that ordinary German soldiers suddenly became vicious killers, terrorizing the local population? Did everyone turn into something worse than wild animals? The true story of the first World War II offensive that marks in the history of infamy the beginning of a carnage and a historical tragedy.
2019

Oscar-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto weaves man-made and natural sounds together in his works. His anti-nuclear activism grew after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, and his career only paused after a 2014 cancer diagnosis.
2017

A film about Johnny Bode. Schlager diva, Operetta hero, filth musical innovator, enfant terrible, compulsive liar and amoral rogue. Johnny Bode (1912-1983) was very successful in Sweden and Europe. Yet he is today almost completely forgotten. Why? His life was so overwhelming, glamorous, fast and bizarre. So un-Swedish. He became fascinated by the nazism. Was arrested by the Gestapo and detained at Grini concentration camp in Norway. For five weeks. After the war he moved to East Berlin and proclaimed himself a dear friend of the GDR. Later he was deported and returned to Sweden. A time of fencing and small crimes followed. Escaped to Brussels at first and later Vienna. He was, as Juan Delgada, hired by the Vienna Opera to create new operettas. And was very successful. Johnny Bode died exhausted alone and abandoned in Malmö during the summer of 1983.
2017

"Elemental" is the groundbreaking television event from Academy Award-winning executive producer Robert Zemeckis that reveals how the elements of the periodic table have controlled the outcome of human history. This one-hour drama tells the harrowing story of the Hindenburg disaster. Sophisticated cinematography, animation and spectacular visual effects bring this fiery saga to life in a way no audience has seen before.
2017

2016

The film looks at men and women of color in the U.S. Merchant Marine from 1938-1975. Through chronicling the lives of these men and women who, with a median age of 82, are beset with a host of life-threatening illnesses, the movie tells how they navigated issues of racism, disparities in the workplace, gender and familial relations.
2012

This documentary focuses on 1939, considered to be Hollywood's greatest year, with film clips and insight into what made the year so special.
2009

Anne Boyd, one of Australia's leading contemporary composers, teaches music at the publicly funded University of Sydney. This documentary chronicles a year in the life of an academic department that's under the financial gun.
2001
The story of black and mixed race people in Nazi Germany who were sterilised, experimented upon, tortured and exterminated in the Nazi concentration camps. It also explores the history of German racism and examines the treatment of Black prisoners-of-war. The film uses interviews with survivors and their families as well as archival material to document the Black German Holocaust experience.
1997

Riding the Rails offers a visionary perspective on the presumed romanticism of the road and cautionary legacy of the Great Depression. The filmmakers relay the experiences and painful recollections of these now-elderly survivors of the rails. Forced to travel more by economic necessity than the spirit of adventure, the film's subjects dispel romantic myths of a hobo existence and its corresponding veneer of freedom. Riding the Rails recounts the hoboes' trade secrets for survival and accounts of dank miseries, loneliness, imprisonment, death, and dispossession. Sixty years later, the filmmakers transport their subjects back to the tracks, where the surging impact of sound and movement resuscitates memories of a shattered adolescence and devastating rite of passage.
1997

This 56-minute documentary on America's most controversial and unique composer manages to cover a great many aspects of Cage's work and thought. His love for mushrooms, his Zen beliefs and use of the I Ching, and basic bio details are all explained intelligently and dynamically. Black Mountain, Buckminster Fuller, Rauschenberg, Duchamp are mentioned. Yoko Ono, John Rockwell, Laurie Anderson, Richard Kostelanetz make appearances. Fascinating performance sequences include Margaret Leng-Tan performing on prepared piano, Merce Cunningham and company, and performances of Credo In Us, Water Music, and Third Construction. Demystifies the man who made music from silence, from all sounds, from life.
1990
1948

A showcase of German chancellor and Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally.
1935

An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time.
1933