Our Films

VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE

SEVEN CENTURIES OF ETHNIC VIOLENCE.
SEVENTY EIGHT DAYS OF NATO BOMBS.
ONE SYMBOL OF A PERILOUS PEACE.

VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE – the first documentary feature about post-war Kosovo.  Confused with the earlier Balkan conflicts and overshadowed by Afghanistan and Iraq, Kosovo’s story may hold the most compelling lessons of all.

The bridge in the town of Mitrovica has become a flashpoint in the continuing conflict between Muslims, Christians and Roma (Gypsies).  Through riveting first-person accounts the dreams and nightmare of Kosovars unfold.  Muslims who love America, Christians who despise it.  Roma (Gypsies) dying of lead poisoning.  Orphans of war, wives of the missing, parents of the murdered.  Families who just want to go home.  Their vivid stories reveal powerful insights into the religious and ethnic conflicts raging around the world today.

Sometimes hopeful, sometimes tragic, the struggle to make peace in Kosovo exposes the human cost of the politics of hate, and reminds us that the ultimate responsibility for peace lies within us all.

Click here to visit the VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE site.

TAK FOR ALT

TAK FOR ALT (color, 60 minutes) tells the story of educator Judy Meisel, a Holocaust survivor whose experiences during World War II inspired a life-long campaign against racism.

The film opens with Meisel recalling news coverage of a 1963 race riot in Philadelphia, sparked by a black family, the Bakers, moving into an all-white neighborhood. For Meisel, the scene was chillingly familiar: "Here I was in the City of Brotherly Love, and it was like Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938... and nobody was doing anything about it. So I baked some cookies and went to see the Bakers..." The ensuing film weaves archival material and location footage of Meisel retracing her wartime experiences through Eastern Europe working slave labor in a Kovno Ghetto boot factory, watching her mother disappear into the Stutthof Concentration Camp gas chamber, crawling across a frozen river after fleeing a death march, passing as a Catholic while working for the Wermacht, and finally escaping to Denmark, 16 years old and weighing forty-seven pounds.

Click here to visit the TAK FOR ALT site.

DAYBREAK BERLIN

DAYBREAK BERLIN (color, 35mm anamorphic, 26 minutes) On the last day of World War II in Berlin, a member of the anti-nazi resistance must find the psychological strength to endure her life’s biggest challenge—survival. Based on Ilse-Margret Vogel’s harrowing World War II memoir Bad Times, Good Friends, Daybreak Berlin tells the true story of Ilse’s physical and psychological survival on the day Berlin fell.

Part of a tight-knit circle of German intellectuals and pacifists who strongly opposed the Nazis, Ilse defiantly remained in Berlin throughout the war, quietly subverting Hitler’s regime. On May 1, 1945, when Russian troops finally burst through Berlin’s Brandenburg gate, Ilse comes face-to-face with the brutality of the “liberators” for whom she has waited so long. Hopeless, suicidal and alone, Ilse must find the psychological strength to endure one last day—the last day of the century’s greatest war.

Click here to visit the DAYBREAK BERLIN site.