The Long Way Home
"For the survivors of the Holocaust, liberation was only the beginning."
The story of the post World War II Jewish refugee situation from liberation to the establishment of the modern state of Israel.
"For the survivors of the Holocaust, liberation was only the beginning."
The story of the post World War II Jewish refugee situation from liberation to the establishment of the modern state of Israel.
Morgan Freeman
Narrator (voice)
Ed Asner
George Patton / Immigrant to USA / David Ben-Gurion / Holocaust Survivor (voice)
Sean Astin
Earl G. Harrison, Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization (voice)
Martin Landau
(voice)
Miriam Margolyes
(voice)
David Paymer
(voice)
Nina Siemaszko
(voice)
Helen Slater
(voice)
Michael York
(voice)
The story of the post World War II Jewish refugee situation from liberation to the establishment of the modern state of Israel.
I don’t think I’ve seen a documentary that has attempted to follow the period immediately after the liberation of the death camps at the end of WWII through to the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948, and this makes good use of a wide array of archive material to illustrate just how torturous this process was for many. With most of Europe in ruins and even the victors on their economic knees, the problem of what to do with tens of thousands of displaced persons was one that nobody had a straightforward solution for. Tired of being shunted from pillar to post, the Jewish people increasingly focus on returning to their ancient homeland of Palestine, but with the Arab population united in opposition and the British struggling to operate their UN mandate effectively, this was going to have to be yet another fight for these exhausted and determined people - many of whom had little more than the clothes they stood up in and the numbers tattooed onto their flesh. What this does not is offer us any semblance of balance as it tells it’s story. There are contributions from survivors and from some American journalists and politicians to impress upon us the difficulties these people faced, but it doesn’t really address the chronic issues of supply faced by the allies as they faced massive problems of their own in the aftermath of the war. Much is made of the British refusal to allow unfettered migration into Palestine, but not to explain why this view was taken by Attlee’s resource-stretched government in London, nor does it really present anything by away of a credible plan from the Jewish leadership to establish their new country in the face of hostility from their would-be new neighbours upon whom most of the West was still heavily dependent upon for oil. Indeed, the overly simplistic narrative risks using their homelessness as a shield to justify a period of indiscriminate assassinations and bombings of the British establishment along the lines of them being freedom fighters against an enemy who are not given any opportunity in this film to explain their rationale for their position. It also raises quite a few issues around the concept of modern-day “nationhood” as a territorial entity in a part of the world where that might have been more suitably attributed to a much less specifically geographically defined location? It has been bought and paid for by Americans so of course Truman gets some decent press as the United Nations narrowly votes to create two nations in Palestine, and the film ends with a rather naive sense of optimism that further shows the editorial limitations of it’s scripting. Still, it presents an impressively assembled selection of clips from an astonishing, troubling and frequently harrowing collection of newsreels and military films that indicates that the end of the conflict with the Nazis was, in many ways, just the beginning.
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The extraordinary story of how Hollywood changed World War II – and how World War II changed Hollywood, through the interwoven experiences of five legendary filmmakers who went to war to serve their country and bring the truth to the American people: John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens. Based on Mark Harris’ best-selling book, “Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War.”
Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated future world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?
Prelude to War was the first film of Frank Capra's Why We Fight propaganda film series, commissioned by the Pentagon and George C. Marshall. It was made to convince American troops of the necessity of combating the Axis Powers during World War II. This film examines the differences between democratic and fascist states.
Amid the failing counteroffensive, a journalist follows a Ukrainian platoon on their mission to traverse one mile of heavily fortified forest and liberate a strategic village from Russian occupation. But the farther they advance through their destroyed homeland, the more they realize that this war may never end.
A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her. Her camera captures incredible stories of loss, laughter and survival as Waad wrestles with an impossible choice– whether or not to flee the city to protect her daughter’s life, when leaving means abandoning the struggle for freedom for which she has already sacrificed so much.