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Night Will Fall

   2014    History
Researchers discover film footage from World War II that turns out to be a lost documentary shot by Alfred Hitchcock and Sidney Bernstein in 1945 about German concentration camps liberated by allied troops. When Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1944-45, their terrible discoveries were recorded by army and newsreel cameramen, revealing for the first time the full horror of what had happened. Making use of British, Soviet and American footage, the Ministry of Information’s Sidney Bernstein (later founder of Granada Television) aimed to create a documentary that would provide lasting, undeniable evidence of the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes. He commissioned a wealth of British talent, including editor Stewart McAllister, writer and future cabinet minister Richard Crossman – and, as treatment advisor, his friend Alfred Hitchcock. Yet, despite initial support from the British and US Governments, the film was shelved, and only now, 70 years on, has it been restored and completed by Imperial War Museums. This eloquent, lucid documentary by André Singer (executive producer of the award-winning The Act of Killing) tells the extraordinary story of the filming of the camps and the fate of Bernstein’s project, using original archive footage and eyewitness testimonies.

Fury

   2014    History
Was the sacrifice of an entire generation worldwide an avoidable or a necessary tragedy? Are the roots of World War II to be found in the devastation of World War I? Drawing from over 300 hours of archival footage and tracing the journeys of the civilians and soldiers across the world, anonymous or well-known, who fought for survival in this unprecedented period in human history, both heroic and barbaric. On June 28th, 1914, the assassination of an obscure Austrian archduke in Sarajevo triggers the most disastrous conflict the world has ever known. Germany becomes an enemy to France, invades Belgium, and in September arrives at the gates of Paris.
Series: Apocalypse: World War 1

Which Universe Are We In

   2015    Science
Imagine a world where infinite copies of you are playing out every storyline of your life. It sounds like a plot stolen straight from Hollywood, but far from it. This is the multiverse. Until very recently the whole idea of the multiverse was dismissed as a fantasy, but now this strangest of ideas is at the cutting edge of science. And for a growing number of scientists, the multiverse is the only way we will ever truly make sense of the world we are in. Do multiple universes exist? And if so, which one are we actually in?" Imagine a world where dinosaurs still walk the earth. A world where the Germans won World War II and you are president of the United States. Imagine a world where the laws of physics no longer apply.

The Spirit of forty five

       Culture
The film is focused on and celebrating the radical changes in postwar Britain under the Labour government of Clement Attlee, which came to power in 1945. Relying primarily on archive footage and interviews, and without a narrative voiceover, the documentary recounts the endemic poverty in prewar Britain, the sense of optimism that followed victory in World War II and the subsequent expansion of the welfare state, founding of the National Health Service and nationalisation of significant parts of the UK's economy.
The film documents the extent to which these achievements, as the filmmaker Ken Loach sees them, have since been subject to attack in the decades that followed, particularly under the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s

The Age of Revolution

   2016    History
Between 1850 and 1950, three cataclysmic revolutions shook China to the core, but out of them, today's China emerged. The film begins in Canton with the meeting of a US missionary and a Chinese student. Inspired by the Christian story and calling himself God's second son, Hong unleashed the bloodiest war of the 19th century, the Taiping Rebellion.
As imperial China weakened, foreign influence grew. Treaty ports expanded, bringing growth and wealth, trams, railways and western sensibilities. But this provoked another surge of violence, the Boxer Rebellion, an attack against the foreigners, which was crushed by those same foreigners, who extorted a huge indemnity - $60 billion in today's money.
Then in 1912, the empire fell, and many groups contested China's future. In World War I, China sent 100,000 men to the western front, only to be humiliated at Versailles when German colonies in China were handed to Japan. Between the two world wars, the disparity between rich and poor, city and countryside increased. We visit Hong Kong's Peninsular Hotel in the jazz age and then follow Mao on the Long March to Yan'an, the heartland of revolution.
World War II came to China two years earlier than it did in the west. Wood talks to a survivor of the Japanese massacre of Nanjing in 1937 and then charts the triumph of the communists, before ending the story with Mao's death and the boom time of the last 30 years. The series ends with the warmth of the Chinese family and, at Beijing's Altar of Heaven, a final haunting glimpse of eternal China.
Series: The Story of China

Japan at War

       History
Japan's role in World War II gets a whole new perspective in this consisting entirely of full colour footage, including colour films from Japan that were recently discovered. As the visuals of the world war take on a new vivid immediateness, the story of the rise of the militarists in Japan is told through the personal writings of the Japanese themselves. From the first overconfident tastes of victory, to the devastating losses that led to an unthinkable defeat amidst the ruins, the Pacific Theater of World War II is told through the Japanese's eyes.