With the Nazis having reduced Warsaw to little more than rubble, the young “Alex” (Jordan Kiziuk) is separated from his family, who have been sent to a concentration camp, and is now forced to scavenge as best he can amongst the ruins. Fortunately, this is a resourceful young lad who quickly learns his way around the ghetto using the sewers and the attics to keep himself safe. That’s easier said than done as the water supply has been turned off and food is extremely scarce. There are still people in the city but with plenty prepared to turn him in for an apple or a loaf of bread, he has to be very wary of whom he can trust. His encounter with fellow refugees “Freddy” (Lee Ross) and “Henyrk” (Simon Gregor) alerts him to a way out of their squalid environment into safer parts but he still hopes for a reunion with his dad “Stefan” (Patrick Bergin) and for that to happen, however unlikely, he must risk remaining in a Jewish quarter that is being slowly demolished by the invaders. It’s a lot of responsibility for this young lad who really only has himself and his pet mouse “Snow” against perils around every corner, and Kiziuk holds that role together engagingly well. This film is also quite interesting in that it tells us the story from that child’s perspective which offers quite an affecting way to demonstrate both the brutishness of the soldiers and their indiscriminate thuggery as neither age nor sex made the slightest difference to the treatment they received. The production takes us deep into the infrastructure of “Ptasia Street” and into the psychology of both this boy and those he encounters as he must live his life by his guile and with some occasional goodwill, and though the brutality isn’t as graphic as in many similar stories, it is just as impactful. It’s quite compelling to watch and his choice of book - “Robinson Crusoe” rather sums the whole thing up.
Set in colonial French Indochina during the 1930s to 1950s, this is the story of Éliane Devries, a French plantation owner, and of her adopted Vietnamese daughter, Camille, set against the backdrop of the rising Vietnamese nationalist movement.
When in 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, their troops quickly besieged Leningrad. Foreign journalists are evacuated but one of them, Kate Davies, is presumed dead and misses the plane. Alone in the city she is helped by Nina Tsvetnova a young and idealist police officer and together they will fight for their own survival and the survival of the people in the besieged Leningrad.
This story starts in 1980 in Paris as the memories of Andrei Borodin, a Soviet agent, take the action back to 1943 during the Teheran meetings of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. A high-ranking Nazi officer developed a plan to assassinate the three world leaders in order to undermine the Allied forces. He commissioned the German agent Max Richard to carry out his plan, but it failed miserably due to the quick action and thinking of Andrei. While in Teheran, Andrei met a French woman, Marie Louni, living in the city and they had a brief but intense affair. Nearly four decades later, the Nazi officer has been captured - but not for long. Freed by terrorists, the officer is hunting down the German agent who failed to carry out the planned assassinations. Max lives at Françoise, a young French woman, who hides him.
A Polish-Jewish family comes to the U.S. at the beginning of the twentieth century. There, the family and their children try to make themselves a better future in the so-called promised land.
After his father is murdered by the Nazis in 1938, a young Viennese Jew named Ferry Tobler flees to Prague, where he joins forces with another expatriate and a sympathetic Czech relief worker. Together with other Jewish refugees, the three make their way to Paris, and, after spending time in a French prison camp, eventually escape to Marseille, from where they hope to sail to a safe port.
In 1942, in an occupied Paris, the apolitical grocer Edmond Batignole lives with his wife and daughter in a small apartment in the building of his grocery. When his future son-in-law and collaborator of the German Pierre-Jean Lamour calls the Nazis to arrest the Jewish Bernstein family, they move to the confiscated apartment. Some days later, the young Simon Bernstein escapes from the Germans and comes to his former home. When Batignole finds him, he feels sorry for the boy and lodges him, hiding Simon from Pierre-Jean and also from his wife. Later, two cousins of Simon meet him in the cellar of the grocery. When Pierre-Jean finds the children, Batignole decides to travel with the children to Switzerland.
Seven British children bury their mother and hide her death, until their long-lost father returns.
In a small Tokyo apartment, twelve-year-old Akira must care for his younger siblings after their mother leaves them and shows no sign of returning.
The true, harrowing story of a young Jewish girl who, with her family and their friends, is forced into hiding in an attic in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.
A young prosecutor in postwar West Germany investigates a massive conspiracy to cover up the Nazi pasts of prominent public figures.