40s movie theater resistance against nazis

In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as "The Basterds" are chosen specifically to spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis. The Basterds, lead by Lt. Aldo Raine soon cross paths with a French-Jewish teenage girl who runs a movie theater in Paris which is targeted by the soldiers.

In Nazi Germany, a projectionist is forced to screen propaganda films before the main features. But the rats of the cinema have other ideas. They disrupt a screening to put on a show of their own.

A young Holocaust survivor who descends into crime; an Italian-Jewish engineer who wants to see a movie; a German Christian who forgives her husband’s murderer because of her Buddhist faith; and a Jewish woman who carries on an affair with a Nazi and exposes members of the resistance so that she and her children may survive: their fates intersect when two bullets are fired into a queue of people waiting to see “A Man Escaped” at Tel Aviv’s Cinema North in 1957.

Eight hundred German filmmakers (cast and crew) fled the Nazis in the 1930s. The film uses voice-overs, archival footage, and film clips to examine Berlin's vital filmmaking in the 1920s; then it follows a producer, directors, composers, editors, writers, and actors to Hollywood: some succeeded and many found no work. Among those profiled are Erich Pommer, Joseph May, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and Peter Lorre. Once in Hollywood, these exiles helped each other, housed new arrivals, and raised money so others could escape. Some worked on anti-Nazi films, like Casablanca. The themes and lighting of German Expressionism gave rise in Hollywood to film noir.

The film centers around a revolt in a fascist concentration camp in the year 1943.

Film producer Gene Gutowski (Repulsion, Cul-de-Sac, The Pianist) was fourteen years old when first the Soviets then the Nazis invaded his hometown of Lwow, Poland. With a combination of chutzpah, street smarts and an unflinching will to live, he spent the war flirting with danger as a teenage Jew hiding in plain site. Witnessing first-hand the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi occupation, frequently cheating death himself and losing his entire family in the process, Gutowski's story is ultimately one of hope. As recounted with humor and pathos to his son, filmmaker Adam Bardach, his remarkable survival tale represents a thumb of the nose at darkness and totalitarianism.

The documentary shows the exclusion of Jewish film makers after Hitler took power in Germany and how this led to an independent filmproduction in Vienna and Budapest from 1934 till 1937. With previously unpublished archive material are portrayed: Hermann Kosterlitz (Henry Koster), Felix Joachimson (Jackson), Joe Pasternak, Otto Wallburg, Hans Jaray, Franziska Gaal, Rosy Barsony, Hortense Raky, Oskar Pilzer, Zoltan Vidor, Ernst Verebes.

Directed by Hava Kohav Beller, this stirring documentary chronicles the anti-Nazi resistance movement within Hitler's Germany and the countless unsuccessful attempts to remove the führer from power.

1933, California. The Nazi regime seeks to establish itself in the United States. Operating in the shadows, Nazi spies have infiltrated Hollywood and the studios, spreading their ideology and preparing to take over. Leon Lewis, a Jewish lawyer who sees the growing threat, stands in the way. With few resources, he sets up a spy ring to dismantle the Nazi groups and expose the plot. Blending archival footage and animation, this documentary depicts the unsung story of an ordinary hero who foresaw and corrected his country's fate before it was too late.

One of the few European films of the 30s to criticize the Nazis, even if they couldn't be directly named due to censorship: Gangsters with gray hats stir up trouble in what is obviously the Sudetenland.