The Road to War (The End of an Empire)

Amadeus

September 1984 •English

Disciplined Italian composer Antonio Salieri becomes consumed by jealousy and resentment towards the hedonistic and remarkably talented young Salzburger composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Grand Illusion

June 1937 •French

A group of French soldiers, including the patrician Captain de Boeldieu and the working-class Lieutenant Maréchal, grapple with their own class differences after being captured and held in a World War I German prison camp. When the men are transferred to a high-security fortress, they must concoct a plan to escape beneath the watchful eye of aristocratic German officer von Rauffenstein, who has formed an unexpected bond with de Boeldieu.

Fighting Fred Funston

April 2017 •English

On April 18th, 1906, San Francisco witnessed its most devastating natural disaster – an earthquake that initiated a city-wide fire. The commanding officer of the U.S. Army base at the Presidio, Fred Funston, gathered citizens to fight the fire, patrol the streets, and rebuild the city – all without authorization.

Flyboys

September 2006 •English

The adventures of the Lafayette Escadrille, young Americans who volunteered for the French military before the U.S. entered World War I, and became the country's first fighter pilots.

The Great War

December 2019 •English

In November of 1918 as World War I was ending, a unit of American soldiers goes behind enemy lines to find a lost platoon of African American soldiers.

Asunder

July 2016 •English

Esther Johnson’s film uses local archive footage to convey the story of Sunderland's involvement in the First World War, from the men who fought in the fields to those who stayed behind to work in the region’s shipyards and munitions factories.

Maria Theresia

December 1951 •German

A biography of the eighteenth century Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa.

Queen Marie of Romania

November 2019 •Romanian

Devastated by the First World War and plunged into political controversy, Romania's every hope accompanies its Queen on her mission to Paris, to lobby for its great unification's international recognition at the 1919 Peace Talks.

After Mein Kampf?

August 1961 •English

By combining actual footage with reenactments, this film offers both a documentary and fictional account of the life of Adolf Hitler, from his childhood in Vienna, through the rise of the Third Reich, to his final act of suicide in the waning days of WWII. The film also provides considerable, and often shocking, detail of the atrocities enacted by the Nazi regime under Hitler's command.

The Green Room

April 1978 •French

A widower maintains a memorial room filled with his late wife's belongings. When fire destroys it, he transforms a chapel into a new shrine to preserve her memory.

Field Punishment No.1

April 2014 •English

In 1916, the New Zealand Government secretly shipped 14 of the country's most outspoken conscientious objectors to the Western Front in an attempt to convert, silence, or quite possibly kill them. This is their story.

Beware Haderer

January 1992 •German

A staged TV portrait of the Austrian cartoonist Gerhard Haderer; and first collaboration with Maria Hofstätter.

The Red Baron

March 2008 •German

Richthofen goes off to war like thousands of other men. As fighter pilots, they become cult heroes for the soldiers on the battlefields. Marked by sportsmanlike conduct, technical exactitude and knightly propriety, they have their own code of honour. Before long he begins to understand that his hero status is deceptive. His love for Kate, a nurse, opens his eyes to the brutality of war.

Der brave Soldat Schwejk

September 1960 •German

All Quiet on the Western Front

November 1979 •English

At the start of World War I, Paul Baumer is a young German patriot, eager to fight. Indoctrinated with propaganda at school, he and his friends eagerly sign up for the army soon after graduation. But when the horrors of war soon become too much to bear, and as his friends die or become gravely wounded, Paul questions the sanity of fighting over a few hundreds yards of war-torn countryside.

Mutig in die neuen Zeiten - Im Reich der Reblaus

October 2005 •German

Austria in the mid-1950s. Seamstress Elfi Redlich and her two children are about to emigrate to America with occupation officer Hal when her husband, missing for eleven years, returns home from Siberia. Factory owner Ulmendorff is deported to Russia on his way to his niece Valerie's wedding as a result of an intrigue by his employee Hasak. Hasak's joy is short-lived, as the Jewish owner of the factory asserts his ownership.

Cake Bakers & Trouble Makers: Lucy Worsley's 100 Years of the WI

July 2015 •English

Documentary to mark the WI's centenary. Lucy Worsley goes beyond the stereotypes of jam and Jerusalem to reveal the surprisingly radical side of this Great British institution.

The Blue Max

June 1966 •English

A young pilot in the German air force of 1918, disliked as lower-class and unchivalrous, tries ambitiously to earn the medal offered for 20 kills.

King of Hearts

December 1966 •French

An ornithologist mistaken for an explosives expert is sent alone into a small French town during WWI to investigate a garbled report from the resistance about a bomb which the departing Germans have set to blow up a weapons cache.

14-18: The Noise & the Fury

November 2008 •French

Not everything has been told about World War One. This documentary tries to explain how tens of millions of men could have suffered the unbelievable toughness of life in trenches during the 4 year ordeal. How could they have accepted the idea of a sure death or injury while not being able to tell why they were fighting.