The Donner Party

This Passing Parade series entry looks at three instances of people who either caused or were the victims of errors.

A politically naive Viennese butcher (Bockerer) manages to survive the Nazi occupation of Austria and the second world war.

A man that is a stranger, is an incredibly easy man to hate. However, walking in a stranger’s shoes, even for a short while, can transform a perceived adversary into an ally. Power is found in coming to know our neighbor’s hearts. For in the darkness of ignorance, enemies are made and wars are waged, but in the light of understanding, family extends beyond blood lines and legacies of hatred crumble.

Tells the story of the life and multifaceted heritage of Mirza Fatali Akhundzadeh , the founder of Azerbaijani drama, a great public figure, who left an indelible mark on the history of Azerbaijani and Middle Eastern literature . The film depicts three periods of the playwright's life - childhood, youth and old age.

On the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea lies one of the most megalomaniac projects built by the Nazis. The ‘Monster by the Sea’, a colossus of brickwork that stretches for kilometres, intended as a futurist holiday resort for the inhabitants of the Third Reich. A paragon of ‘guilty architecture’. Later occupied by the communist regime, it has since the fall of the Wall fallen victim to property developers who have found it a tough nut to crack. Nico Weber’s Inside Prora uncovers the storied history of a project that symbolises the utopian intentions of modernism and the emergence of mass tourism.

The beautiful and dangerous lesbian slave trader Druscilla practices all the customs of Ancient Rome - everything in Excess. But even excess can have its limits and the punishments can be very severe if she crosses the line and risks falling out of favor.

This short documentary follows historian Kate Taylor as she recounts John Wilkes Booth's final attempt to escape across the Potomac River.

This "March of Time" entry examines the many problems, both human and economic, that faced the Allies in their respective zones of Germany - USA, England and Russia - following the end of World War II, and the Allied occupation of what was left of the country following the Nazi reign of Adolf Hitler. The Cold War issues had not yet fully surfaced, so this entry, with fleeting glances into each Zone of the time, traced what economic recovery had been made by the end of 1946, and how the average German citizen of 1946 was living...or getting by.

In 1794, French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre produced the world's first defense of "state terror" - claiming that the road to virtue lay through political violence. This film combines drama, archive and documentary interviews to examine Robespierre's year in charge of the Committee Of Public Safety - the powerful state machine at the heart of Revolutionary France. Contesting Robespierre's legacy is Slavoj Zizek, who argues that terror in the cause of virtue is justifiable, and Simon Schama, who believes the road from Robespierre ran straight to the gulag and the 20th-century concentration camp. The drama, based on original sources, follows the life-and-death politics of the Committee during "Year Two" of the new Republic.

It is the world’s most mysterious manuscript. A book, written by an unknown author, illustrated with pictures that are as bizarre as they are puzzling — and written in a language that even the best cryptographers have been unable to decode. No wonder that this script even has a part in Dan Brown’s latest bestseller “The Lost Symbol”.