MERA YAAR

The Lascar

At the end of the 18th century, hundreds of Indian sailors, known as lascars, worked amongst European settlers in Aotearoa New Zealand - often under the gruesome working conditions of seal hunting gangs. The story follows a lascar, Dasa, who has been abandoned on the coast of Aotearoa NZ by the East India Company, alongside his sealing gang. When Dasa finds himself in the middle of a conflict between his abusive British superior and two Māori traders, he is faced with a choice: bend the knee or take a stand.

Viva Zapata!

The story of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, who led a rebellion against the corrupt, oppressive dictatorship of president Porfirio Díaz in the early 20th century.

Four Days in September

Fernando, a journalist, and his friend César join terrorist group MR8 in order to fight Brazilian dictatorial regime during the late sixties. César, however, is wounded and captured during a bank hold up. Fernando then decides to kidnap the American ambassador in Brazil and ask for the release of fifteen political prisoners in exchange for his life.

Carlos

The story of Venezuelan revolutionary, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, who founded a worldwide terrorist organization and raided the OPEC headquarters in 1975 before being caught by the French police.

Inquilab

A documentary that traces the life and times of Bhagat Singh, a committed Marxist who most ably exemplified the spirit of revolutionary resistance against British imperialism in undivided India.

Bury My Heart with Tonawanda

A historical film about the Seneca culture featuring the Tonawanda Indian Reservation, Bury My Heart with Tonawanda tells the story of a developmentally disabled boy with Downs Syndrome who is rejected by his own family but is accepted and nurtured by the Tonawanda Seneca Nation.

Two Lives for Algeria and All the Wretched of the Earth

In 1994, at over seventy years old, Gilberte and William Sportisse, threatened by the FIS, arrived from Algeria. Of Jewish faith, he of Arabic mother tongue, they formed a fighting couple, started for the independence of Algeria, always with an unshakeable faith in humanity. They enjoy recounting the participation of Algerian Jews in the Second World War and the struggle for Algerian independence. They provide us with previously unpublished information on the public and clandestine struggles of the Algerian Communist Party before and after independence, and on the repression of activists who, like William and Gilberte Sportisse, were tortured and imprisoned after Colonel Boumédiène came to power. The film is an ode to understanding between people of different origins or cultures and a tribute to a couple whose youthful character and enthusiasm still astonish.

We Believed

1828. In the wake of the repression of revolutionary uprisings in the monarchist South, three young friends join Giuseppe Mazzini's patriotic cause, seeking to finally unify Italy under a republican government. Their idealism will clash with the inevitable disillusionment as they grow apart over the following fifty years.

Sandino

Narrative of a period of life (1926 - 1934) of the Nicaraguan revolutionary leader Sandino, who was known as "The general of free men."

Egaro: The Eleven

Egaro celebrates the centenary of the historical football match between Mohun Bagan and East Yorkshire Regiment for the IFA Shield where Bagan snatched the shield on 29 July 1911 during a time when India was under British rule.

Love in the Great Smoky Mountains: A National Park Romance

Former sweethearts reunite at an archeological dig in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. As they work together competing for the same research grant, they discover they might still have feelings for one another.

The Declaration of Independence

This historical featurette focuses on Caesar Rodney of Delaware who in the summer of 1776 cast the deciding vote, at the meeting of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, so that the Declaration of Independence was adopted.

Frihed forpligter

Danish social democratic propaganda film. During the Occupation, the young freedom fighter Søren had a good working relationship with a comrade in the resistance movement, despite the fact that Søren was a social democrat and his comrade a communist. After the liberation in May 1945, the differences that had been less important during the war begin to stand in Søren's way. Both his friendship with his comrade and his relationship with the wealthy Inger fall apart in the summer of liberation. But through his work in the Social Democratic Party, Søren experiences a renewed enthusiasm and resumes his relationship with Inger. Together, they actively engage in the party's work and both see it as an extension of the struggle for freedom during the occupation. Denmark's entry into NATO is particularly important.

They Joined the Front

In this film, four key witnesses, who live in Algeria today, as full-fledged Agerians, show us what this colonization was really like, so "beneficial" that they themselves perceived it as the oppression of one people by another. Three of them, who today would be called "pieds noirs," in other words, those Europeans to whom France, the occupying power, gave the best land, taken from the indigenous populations, work, and exclusive rights, not shared by the entire population, lived rather well compared to the majority of the "natives." The fourth was far from all that and lived in Argentina. Annie Steiner, Felix Colozzi, Pierre Chaulet, and Roberto Muniz explain to us what led them to show solidarity with the struggle of the weak, the humiliated, and to risk their freedom and their lives by committing to liberate Algeria.

Oldtimer

The aged rocker Igor works as a journalist and DJ at the "Radio Student" in Ljubljana. He notices that the janitor Miha works for the police, tapping the walls and observing the journalists who are critical of the regime. After a clash with his editor, Igor decides to leave for Greece by his old bike DKW from 1938, via Bosnia and Serbia. Young Rahela joins him on the trip. Traveling through Yugoslavia, Igor becomes involved in unexpected turmoil: Milosevic's "antibureaucratic revolution" starts in Serbia and Vojvodina.

The Golden Cage

It is an early winter morning in Kolkata in 1989 and the palatial old "Roy Choudhury" house lies dilapidated, housing the last few members of a once huge affluent joint family. Rudro, the younger brother of the last generation, an under-confident, nondescript man in his mid-30s tries to convince Rajatabho, the eldest of the brothers to take up the offer of selling the house in a desperate attempt to save themselves from bankruptcy. Rajatabho, however, is unrelenting. Rudro, later tries to convince Anjali, Rajatabho's wife, to help change her husband's mind. Later in the day, a crying Anjali grinds down sleeping pills on her kitchen slab. She reminisces down memory lane through each nook and corner of the house as she does this. Finally, at dusk, as Anjali stands alone on the terrace holding a bottle of sleeping pills, Rajatabho suddenly arrives and they look eye to eye for the first time in months.

Stay In Algeria

Algeria, summer 1962, eight hundred thousand French people left their native land in a tragic exodus. But 200,000 of them decided to attempt the adventure of independent Algeria. Over the following decades, political developments would push many of these pieds-noirs into exile towards France. But some never left. Germaine, Adrien, Cécile, Guy, Jean-Paul, Marie-France, Denis and Félix, Algerians of European origin, are among them. Some have Algerian nationality, others do not. Some speak Arabic, others do not. They are the last witnesses to the little-known history of these Europeans who remained out of loyalty to an ideal, a taste for adventure and an unconditional love for a land where they were born, despite all the ups and downs that the free Algeria in full construction had to go through.

The Railways: Engine of Progress

When the first railroads were built some two hundred years ago, they brought about a revolutionary change for mankind, linking cities and countryside, driving the industrial revolution and irrevocably changing the landscape: a history of the railroad from its beginnings to the present day.

Zapata, mort ou vif