In 1930s Italy, Tommaso Scalia commits a triple homicide, and the public, the newly instated fascist leaders and Tommaso himself all believe the death penalty is the only answer. Judge Vito Di Francesco is put on the case, though, and he doesn’t believe in capital punishment. As the judge remains determined to see that Tommaso gets a proper trial, he infuriates members of Mussolini’s regime — and finds his own life at risk.
Category: Politics
October 1970: Under the pretext of waging war against the terrorist group Front de libération du Québec, the Canadian Parliament passes the War Measures Act. The Police and the Army use it and try to break-up popular groups in the Province of Quebec. More than 400 people are arrested for what appears to be their social activities. No charges are ever filed against them. This is their story.
Compilation film, tracing the political career of Dr. Hans Globke, allegedly a former Nazi and Secretary of State in West Germany. Included in Amos Vogel’s classic book Film as a Subversive Art.
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Portrait of Italian tycoon, Enrico Mattei, who headed a state-combined industrial concern for natural resources from the early post-war years and who died under mysterious circumstances in a plane crash at Milan airport in 1962.
Reconstruction of the state’s massacre of Bolivian tin miners that took place on ‘The Night of San Juan’ in 1967 in an attempt to break the re-organization of the radical left. The film uses the miners themselves to act out the reconstruction.
Mourir à Madrid brings together several papers on the Spanish Civil War and integrates capturing different points of view, intended to represent the continuity of the suffering of the Spanish during the Franco regime. The death of Federico Garcia Lorca, Guernica, the defense of Madrid, the International Brigades, are some of the items comprised in this documentary.
The Soviet General Vlasov remains one of the most intriguing, yet least known figures of World War II. In 1942, the German war machine had come to a halt near the Russian city of Leningrad. The Russian Second Assault Army, led by General Vlasov, fights itself to death in an effort to break the German siege. Their general is captured and later defects to the Germans. In ANGELS OF DEATH we experience the fate of General Vlasov’s army as we hear the personal accounts of those who died in the massacre through their poems, letters and photographs.
In the late Spring of 1970, nationwide protests against the war in Vietnam focused in the Wall Street area of New York City and ultimately in a major anti-war demonstration in Washington, D.C. A group of New York University film students documented the demonstrations as they happened in both cities. The extended final scene is a spontaneous conversation among Martin Scorsese, Harvey Keitel, Jay Cocks and Verna Bloom who, along with a large group of NYU students, found themselves frustrated and perplexed by the events and hopeful that the protests would result in change.
