War
see all genres ›Stories of soldiers, civilians, politicians and history itself give the "war documentary" genre variety and depth. With armed conflict, its causes and casualties, as starting points, nonfiction war films speak to a broad array of human concerns.
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Genres / Documentary / War
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A Film Unfinished
At the end of WWII, 60 minutes of raw film, having sat undisturbed in an East German archive, was discovered. Shot by the Nazis in Warsaw in May 1942, and labeled simply "Ghetto," this footage quickly became a resource for historians seeking an authentic record of the Warsaw...Watch Movie
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Double-Headed Eagle
THE DOUBLE HEADED EAGLE Hitler's Rise to Power 1918-1933, the classic documentary by Lutz Becker. A fascinating experiment in documentary filmmaking, THE DOUBLE HEADED EAGLE charts the stealthy rise of the Nazi party in the wake of World War I, as witnessed from the...Watch Movie
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The Eye of Vichy
THE EYE OF VICHY is a brilliantly chosen compilation of long forgotten film footage and newsreels produced by the Nazis and French collaborators during World War II. From the small town of Vichy in central France, Field Marshall Petain's puppet government worked with their...Watch Movie
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Lessons of Darkness
Werner Herzog travelled to Kuwait with producer/cameraman Paul Berriff to shoot the oil fires left blazing by the retreating Iraqi soldiers after the Gulf War. Faced with flames spewing from the earth, a landscape blackened by fire and oil and plumes of dark smoke choking the...Watch Movie
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Black Sun
An uncompromising portrayal of the war crimes perpetrated by the Japanese Imperial Army upon the Chinese military and civilian population of Nanking during the occupation of the city. Hailed by critics as one of the most disturbing films ever released, BLACK SUN: THE NANKING MASSACRE is...Watch Movie
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The Weather Underground
Thirty years ago, with these words, a group of young American radicals announced their intention to overthrow the U.S. government. Fueled by outrage over the Vietnam War and racism in America, they went underground during the 1970s, bombing targets across the country that they...Watch Movie
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Little Dieter Needs to Fly
Dieter Dengler knew he needed to fly from the moment when, as a little boy in war-torn Germany, he witnessed a fighter jet nearly clip his apartment building like some "almighty being." Within twenty years he was flying missions in Vietnam for the United States military. He...Watch Movie
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Resistance
RESISTANCE is the first major look at the complex subject of Jewish efforts to fight back against the Nazis and their collaborators in Eastern Europe. Told by the partisans themselves, without a narrator, and filmed in Lithuania, Poland and Israel, the film uses striking black-and-white imagery...Watch Movie
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Winter Soldier
In February 1971, one month after the revelations of the My Lai massacre, an astonishing public inquiry into war crimes committed by American forces in Vietnam was held at a Howard Johnson motel in Detroit. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War organized this event called the Winter Soldier...Watch Movie
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Get the Picture
This award-winning documentary recounts the remarkable life of John G. Morris, the revered Life Magazine photo-journalist who was involved in the D-Day Normandy landings. Morris worked alongside many of the greatest names in photography, during some of the most pivotal moments in the 20th...Watch Movie
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Human Failure
The expropriation of assets from German Jews during the Third Reich benefited virtually every German citizen. It was not only the Gestapo who invaded Jewish residences to confiscate all property, from bank accounts to the last item of clothing, it was the German tax officials. A competition...Watch Movie
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Ballad of the Little Soldier
Never one to shy away from criticism, Werner Herzog followed the controversy over his treatment of the Aguaruna Indians during the FITZCARRALDO production by journeying into the jungles of Nicaragua and Honduras to document the Miskito Indians’ armed struggle against the...Watch Movie
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Censored Voices
In June of 1967 the armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria massed on Israel's borders and threatened its destruction. Israel launched a preemptive strike and achieved a stunning and decisive victory nearly tripling its size with the occupation of the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan...Watch Movie
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The Sixth Side of the Pentagon
On October 21, 1967, over 100,000 protestors gathered in Washington, D.C., for the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. It was the largest protest gathering yet, and it brought together a wide cross-section of liberals, radicals, hippies, and Yippies. Che Guevara had been...Watch Movie
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The Ties That Bind
THE TIES THAT BIND is an experimental documentary about the filmmaker's mother, who was born and lived in southern Germany from 1920-1950. Through a mixture of personal anecdote and social history, she describes the rise of Nazism, the war years, and the Allied occupation,...Watch Movie
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Concerning Violence
From the director of The Black Power Mixtape comes a bold and fresh visual narrative on Africa, based on newly discovered archive material covering the struggle for liberation from colonial rule in the late '60s and '70s, accompanied by text from Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched...Watch Movie
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Belzec
The horrifically efficient Nazi death camp, Belzec, was in operation for less than one year, but witnessed the murder of at least 600,000 Jews. Once the Soviet counterattacks began, the S.S. eliminated all traces of the camp, and the name Belzec faded from the collective conscience. Conceived of...Watch Movie
