Subject: Genocide
This is the determined effort of one group to entirely exterminate another group of people, whether deliberate, such as Hitler’s Final Solution, or a side effect of other events. But the end result is the same: the decimation of a people and the reduction of us all.
1915 Armenian Genocide
- Director: Mark Bedrosian
- Release Date: 2010
- Production Country: United States
In addition to reforming the Ottoman constitution, the political group known as the Young Turks embarked upon a planned destruction of the Christian Armenian population of Turkey in what is now widely agreed to be one of the first modern acts of genocide and the second-most studied Holocaust.
Angkor: Cambodia Express (Kampuchea Express)
- Director: Lek Kitaparaporn
- Release Date: 1982
- Production Country: Thailand, Italy
A journalist searches for his Vietnamese lover missing in the midst of Pol Pot's reign of terror in Cambodia.
Ararát (Ararat)
- Director: Atom Egoyan
- Release Date: 2002
- Production Country: Canada, France
An Armenian director trying to make a film about the Armenian Genocide struggles with all the people involved: Turkish actors who prefer to forget the "troublesome" history, Armenian actors who suddenly recall painful family histories, and an over-zealous customs official who is superimposing his own struggles with his son's homosexuality onto the film's production. In the end, it's hard to say what the historical truth even is and, even if there is one, which historical truth will prevail in the film.
Darfur Diaries: Message from Home
- Director: Aisha Bain, Jen Marlowe
- Release Date: 2006
- Production Country: United States
Life in Darfur, where drought and ethnic tensions have led to years of civil war, guerrilla warfare, and genocide, is seen through the eyes of those who live there, primarily the women and children affected by the fighting.
Darfur Now
- Director: Ted Braun
- Release Date: 2007
- Production Country: United States
The genocide in Darfur can be seen through the eyes of very different individuals: first-world individuals, such as an actor, an activist, and an international prosecutor, or people who are trying to survive on the ground in Darfur, such as a woman soldier, a man responsible for a large refugee camp, and a man simply trying to feed as many people as he can in the midst of war.
Gardiens de la mémoire (Keepers of Memory)
- Director: Eric Kabera
- Release Date: 2004
- Production Country: Rwanda
The Rwandan genocide left many things to revisit and document, primarily the survivors, the memorials, both planned and unplanned, created and recorded in the landscape for those lost, and also the memory-keepers, those who cannot forget and refuse to let the world forget.
Genocide
- Director: Arnold Schwartzman
- Release Date: 1982
- Production Country: United States
The Jewish community was a vital part of the cultural and intellectual life in Europe, but once Hitler came to power, they lost their homes, their livelihoods, and their families as they were relegated to ghettos, work camps, and the concentration camps where many died in one of the most documented and horrific genocides in history.
Hotel Rwanda
- Director: Terry George
- Release Date: 2004
- Production Country: United Kingdom, United States, Italy, South Africa
As Hutu extremists hunt down and brutally murder their Tutsi neighbors, Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu whose own marriage crosses ethnic lines, finds himself responsible for hundreds of Tutsi and other refugees, forcing him to step up as the central player in a desperate struggle to save lives in the midst of madness and carnage.
Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust
- Director: Daniel Anker
- Release Date: 2004
- Production Country: United States
Pablo Picasso painted Guernica to record the horrors of Franco's war... and General Eisenhower brought in film crews and cameras to make absolutely certain that there was a fixed, permanent record of the horror of the Final Solution and the concentration camps. In the last seventy years, Hollywood has been one of the most powerful forces shaping public memories of the Jewish Holocaust and World War II, but is what they have shown us fact or fiction—or can it be both?
Kosovo: Can You Imagine?
- Director: Boris Malagurski
- Release Date: 2009
- Production Country: Canada
In spite of the presence of NATO troops, Serbians in Kosovo, once the heartland of the Serbian kingdom and still the spiritual home of the Serbian people, are being denied even the most basic of human rights and slowly erased from their own history by the majority group—ethnic Albanians.
Le jour où Dieu est parti en voyage (The Day God Walked Away)
- Director: Philippe Van Leeuw
- Release Date: 2009
- Production Country: France, Belgium
As her Belgian employers and their children are being evacuated to safety, Jacqueline, a Tutsi, survives the first wave of the Rwandan genocide by hiding in the Belgian family’s attic, all the while fearing for her children’s lives. When she finally makes her way home, her worst fears are realized and, though she escapes into the forest with her own life, she teeters on the edge of madness as she searches for a reason to continue living.
Moilkhon (A Pearl in the Forest)
- Director: Agvaantseren Enkhtaivan
- Release Date: 2008
- Production Country: Mongolia
Appointed as a political officer by Stalin's government, a man manipulates and ultimately destroys his village in order to force a woman to marry him.
My Neighbor, My Killer
- Director: Ann Aghion
- Release Date: 2009
- Production Country: United States, France
After the Rwandan Civil War, murderers often ended up living next door to their victims, one group struggling for forgiveness, the other acceptance. To worsen matters, during the Gacaca tribunals, an experiment in confession and reconciliation to rebuild a nation, Rwandan citizens were asked to judge their neighbors who had participated in the violence.
Nanking
- Director: Bill Guttentag, Dan Sturman
- Release Date: 2007
- Production Country: United States
As Japanese soldiers occupy the city of Nanking, raping, murdering, and pillaging, a small group of Europeans bands together to protect as many Chinese citizens as they can; though they may save thousands, tens of thousands more are left vulnerable to the depredations of the Japanese soldiers.
No Man's Land
- Director: Danis Tanovic
- Release Date: 2001
- Production Country: Bosnia and Herzegovina, France, Slovenia, Italy, United Kingdom, Belgium
During the Bosnian War, a wounded Serb and a wounded Bosnian wind up trapped together between the lines of battle, waiting for night and for rescue; instead, a third solder, landing on a landmine, falls into their trench. In their attempts to get help that will not get all three of them blown up, they may find out they really aren't that different after all.
Racism: A History
- Director: Paul Tickell
- Release Date: 2007
- Production Country: United Kingdom
In the 19th century, much of the western leadership and intelligentsia embraced eugenics, a 'science' that 'proved' their racial superiority–and that wreaked havoc on three non-European continents.
Shake Hands With the Devil
- Director: Roger Spottiswoode
- Release Date: 2007
- Production Country: Canada
Commanding the U.N. forces in Rwanda in order to assure the terms of a peace accord are honored, Canadian General Romeo Dallaire suddenly finds himself in the middle of a planned genocide. Despite his best efforts at brokering peace, the Hutus' killings of the Tutsis continue unabated while his pleas for assistance to the world outside and the U.N. in particular are ignored or shunted aside—leaving General Dallaire and his few hundred troops critically shorthanded as they attempt to save any Tutsis they can from the brutal machetes of the radical Hutus.
Shooting Dogs (Beyond the Gates)
- Director: Michael Caton-Jones
- Release Date: 2005
- Production Country: United Kingdom, Germany
As Rwanda descends into chaos, two European men, a priest and an idealistic teacher, find themselves in the middle of the violence when the priest opens the gates of their school to 1500 Tutsis seeking refuge from the genocide. U.N. troops, who have been ordered not to interfere in the murders, can provide some protection within the school, but when they are ordered to evacuate with all the remaining European population, the priest and the teacher face a choice: remain with the people under their protection and risk their own deaths, or take the opportunity to flee and tell an indifferent world the story of what they have seen.
Sometimes in April
- Director: Raoul Peck
- Release Date: 2005
- Production Country: France, United States
During the Rwandan genocide, Augustin, a Hutu, sends his Tutsi wife and their children to safety with his brother Honore, but in the ensuing violence he loses track of his brother. Later, Augustin finds out that Honore was not truly a safe harbor, but was using his position as a radio personality to incite and coordinate attacks against Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
The Armenian Genocide
- Director: Andrew Goldberg
- Release Date: 2006
- Production Country: United States
During World War I, pressure by Muslim refugees from the Balkans and fears that Armenian Christians would lead an uprising informed the the political landscape that ultimately led to the brutal deportations, rapes, and murders of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Ottoman Muslims in the world's first modern genocide.