
Abel Ferrara explores human conflict and the search for peace and balance through the music and words of Patti Smith and the experiences of people at war in Ukraine.



Abel Ferrara explores human conflict and the search for peace and balance through the music and words of Patti Smith and the experiences of people at war in Ukraine.
2024-02-16
5
6.0The rise of the comedian, actor and entertainer who became the improbable wartime leader. Exploring the man behind the series of game changing social media and TV appearances which have encapsulated the defiant response of a nation.
8.0Between February and April 2025, filmmakers Bernard-Henri Lévy and Marc Roussel filmed the Pokrovsk and Soumy fronts in eastern Ukraine, following the fighters of the Anne de Kyiv Brigade, armed by France. They filmed the daily lives of the inhabitants, bombarded by Russian forces terrorizing civilians on the eve of possible negotiations. They interview President Zelenskyy, who is reluctant to travel to Washington, and then watch the rebroadcast of the meeting with Ukrainian soldiers in a bunker. For the real heroes are the anonymous fighters and civilians who hold their heads high in the face of adversity and suffering, and who are filmed on a daily basis. The final part of Lévy’s “Ukrainian Quartet”, Our War is a diary, peppered with flashbacks in which the author recalls the high points of this war that began in 2014.
6.7After the impressive Gulistan, Land of Roses (VdR 2016), the Kurdish filmmaker Zaynê Akyol returns with these conversations with imprisoned members of the Islamic State, alternating their words with aerial views of the countryside. An unexpected look at a far-reaching current political issue and a film whose subject matter and rhythm create an impressive cinematic object.
8.0A chronicle of the civil uprising against the regime of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych that took place in Kyiv in the winter of 2013/14. The film follows the progress of the revolution: from peaceful rallies, half a million strong in the Maidan square, to the bloody street battles between protesters and riot police.
5.8Archival footage, animation and music are used to look back at the eight anti-war protesters who were put on trial following the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
0.0Viktor, who was born deaf, worships the figure of the samurai warrior. When bombs start falling on his countryside home in Kharkiv, his quasi-romantic obsession with war is put to the test.
7.0Anastasia Trofimova, a Russian-Canadian filmmaker, gains unprecedented access to follow a Russian Army battalion in Ukraine. Without any official clearance or permits, she earns the trust of foot soldiers and embeds herself over the span of a year with one battalion as it makes its way across Eastern Ukraine. What she discovers is far from the propaganda and labels pushed by the East or West: an army in disarray, soldiers disillusioned and often struggling to understand what they are fighting for.
9.0Archival film maestro Göran Hugo Olsson has assembled—from a vast catalogue of footage in the vaults of Sweden’s national television service SVT—accounts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as witnessed and represented by Swedish journalists. Stories of the beginning of the Israeli state interwoven with the Palestinian struggle for independence. News coverage with Yasser Arafat and interviews with Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban during a visit to Sweden unseen since first broadcast. From the tenth anniversary of Israel’s founding to the First Intifada, perspectives and encounters with statesmen, civilians, revolutionaries, and intellectuals tell the story from myriad angles of an evolving media landscape, revivifying a history of the ongoing conflict.
8.2The birth of the atomic bomb changed the world forever. In the years before the Manhattan project, a weapon of such power was not even remotely imaginable to most people on earth. And yet, with war comes new inventions. New ways of destroying the enemy. New machines to wipe out human life. The advent of nuclear weapons not only brought an end to the largest conflict in history, but also ushered in an atomic age and a defining era of "big science". However, with the world now gripped by nuclear weapons, we exist constantly on the edge of mankind's total destruction.
6.2A Russian war propaganda film about a virtuoso violinist from Belgium witnessing war crimes.
7.5Ireland, June 1944. The crucial decision about the right time to start Operation Overlord on D-Day comes to depend on the readings taken by Maureen Flavin, a young girl who works at a post office, used as a weather station, in Blacksod, in County Mayo, the westernmost promontory of Europe, far from the many lands devastated by the iron storms of World War II.
7.6Mykola is an eccentric pacifist who wants to be useful to humanity. When the war begins in Donbas, Mykola’s naive world is collapsing as the militants kill his pregnant wife and burn his home to the ground. Recovered, he makes a cardinal decision and gets enlisted in a sniper company. Having met his wife’s killers, he emotionally breaks down and arranges “sniper terror” for the enemy.
8.0Immediately after the US pullout from Afghanistan, Taliban forces occupied the Hollywood Gate complex, which is claimed to be a former CIA base in Kabul.
8.4In 2022, Mantas Kvedaravičius went back to Ukraine, Mariupol, at the heart of the war, to be with the people he had met and filmed in 2015. Following his death, his producers and collaborators have put all their strength into continuing transmitting his work, his vision and his films. Also a PhD in anthropology, Mantas Kvedaravičius wished to testify as a filmmaker as far as possible from the agitation of the media and the politicians. With huge force and sensitivity, Mariupolis 2 depicts life as it continues amidst the bombing and reveals images that convey both tragedy and hope.
7.9How did Nazi Germany, from limited natural resources, mass unemployment, little money and a damaged industry, manage to unfurl the cataclysm of World War Two and come to occupy a large part of the European continent? Based on recent historical works of and interviews with Adam Tooze, Richard Overy, Frank Bajohr and Marie-Bénédicte Vincent, and drawing on rare archival material.
8.0In autumn 1944, during the Liberation of Brittany, writer Louis Guilloux worked as an interpreter for the American army. He was a privileged witness to some little-known dramatic aspects of the Liberation: the rapes and murders committed by GIs on French civilians. He also discovered the racism of American military justice. This experience haunted the novelist for thirty years. In 1976, he recounted it in a short novel, "Ok, Joe", which went unnoticed. This film compares his account with the memories of the last witnesses to these forgotten crimes and their punishments.
6.5Over 3,500 years ago, the powerful Shang Dynasty emerged from the Central Chinese plains. Their armies were led by a fierce and brilliant young general - her name was Fu Hao.
7.5How did the USSR - a country considered a second-rate industrial power, economically inferior to Germany, the USA and the UK - shape its victory over the armies of Hitler's regime, and secure its place among the winners?
8.0The Black Book, drafted during World War II, gathers numerous unique historical testimonies, in an effort to document Nazi abuses against Jews in the USSR . Initially supported by the regime and aimed at providing evidence during the executioners’ trials in the post-war era, the Black Book was eventually banned and most of its authors executed on Stalin’s order. Told through the voices of its most famous instigators, soviet intellectuals Vassilli Grossman, Ilya Ehrenburg and Solomon Mikhoels, the documentary, provides a detailed account of the tragic destiny of this cursed book and puts the Holocaust and Stalinism in a new light.