The City and the City

Apr 7, 2022

1h 27m

★ 3.0

Overview

Six chapters describe the lives and perils of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community which was almost entirely exterminated by the Nazis in 1943. Past and present become an echo chamber in which the viewer experiences, aghast, the madness of humanity.

Genres

Drama

Documentary

Production Companies

Homemade Films

Greek National Opera

The City and the City Trailers

Cast

Leon

Vassilis Kanakis

Maurice

Alexandros Vardaxoglou

Sarina

Angeliki Papoulia

Avraam

Argyris Xafis

Nina

Niki Papandreou

Matika

Themis Bazaka

Isaac

Vasilis Karaboulas

Court clerk

Marissa Triantafyllidou

Sexworker

Marina Siotou

Camping owner

Laertis Malkotsis

The mother

Maria Filini

Lilly

Zoe Sigalou

For four years (1977-1981) Esaias Baitel documented a violent Parisian neo-Nazi gang. Having gained their trust, he was able to get close to them. Living among the gang members, he witnessed horrific events, and while hiding his real identity, he photographed a one-of-a-kind collection of gripping stills. Over thirty years have passed. Esaias Baitel has laid his camera down. He returns to the dark nights he spent in the City of Lights, the city where he lived a double life, going back and forth from the gang to the young family he had just started.

6.0

"Erscheinungsform Mensch": Adolf Eichmann

Mar 23, 1981

Documentary brings the time of the Holocaust to life and provides insight into the mind of the organizer of this crime: Adolf Eichmann. The documentary contrasts Eichmann's statements and memories - documented in the original soundtrack - directly with those of Holocaust survivors. The picture of the person and the crime is rounded off by the many contemporary witnesses who were involved either in Eichmann's arrest or the subsequent trial - such as the doctors and psychologists who looked after him, the guards and police officers through to the interrogator, the public prosecutor and the judge at the trial.

7.3

Sophie's Choice

Dec 8, 1982

Stingo, a young writer, moves to Brooklyn in 1947 to begin work on his first novel. As he becomes friendly with Sophie and her lover Nathan, he learns that she is a Holocaust survivor. Flashbacks reveal her harrowing story, from pre-war prosperity to Auschwitz. In the present, Sophie and Nathan's relationship increasingly unravels as Stingo grows closer to Sophie and Nathan's fragile mental state becomes ever more apparent.

7.1

The Painted Bird

Sep 12, 2019

After losing his parents, a young Jewish boy wanders Eastern Europe, seeking refuge during World War II.

6.6

The Grey Zone

Sep 13, 2001

The story of Auschwitz's twelfth Sonderkommando — one of the thirteen consecutive "Special Squads" of Jewish prisoners placed by the Nazis in the excruciating moral dilemma of assisting in the extermination of fellow Jews in exchange for a few more months of life.

6.1

Adam Resurrected

Aug 8, 2008

After again attempting to commit murder, a Jewish man with a mysterious past and extraordinary intelligence, charisma, and body control returns to an insane asylum, where he makes a startling discovery.

6.8

Warsaw: A City Divided

May 11, 2019

The history of the Warsaw Ghetto (1940-43) as seen from both sides of the wall, its legacy and its memory: new light on a tragic era of division, destruction and mass murder thanks to the testimony of survivors and the discovery of a ten-minute film shot by Polish amateur filmmaker Alfons Ziółkowski in 1941.

5.8

Bulgarian Rhapsody

Mar 4, 2014

The story of two adolescents, Moni and Zhozho, who meet 17-year-old Zheni in 1943 and with whom both fell in love. The events that follow unfold while Bulgaria has to decide on the deportation of 11 343 Jewish citizens in Macedonia and Thrace.

0.0

Delegation

Nov 10, 2023

Three young Israeli students take a school trip to Poland to visit the sites where the Nazis carried out the extermination of European Jews during World War II.

7.1

The Pawnbroker

Apr 20, 1965

A Jewish pawnbroker, a victim of Nazi persecution, loses all faith in his fellow man until he realizes too late the tragedy of his actions.

6.1

Out of the Ashes

Apr 13, 2003

The real-life story of Gisella Perl, a Jewish Hungarian doctor imprisoned in the notorious Auschwitz death camp of World War II.

7.5

Nazi Death Camp: The Great Escape

May 12, 2014

The secret Nazi death camp at Sobibor was created solely for the mass extermination of Jews. But on the 14th October 1943, in one of the biggest and most successful prison revolts of WWII, the inmates fought back.

6.8

The Devil's Arithmetic

Mar 28, 1999

An American-born Jewish adolescent, Hannah Stern, is uninterested in the culture, faith and customs of her relatives. However, she begins to revaluate her heritage when she has a supernatural experience that transports her back to a Nazi death camp in 1941. There she meets a young girl named Rivkah, a fellow captive in the camp. As Rivkah and Hannah struggle to survive in the face of daily atrocities, they form an unbreakable bond.

6.9

Love Gets a Room

Nov 26, 2021

January 1942, in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. Thousands of Jews have been confined to the Warsaw ghetto for more than a year. Outside, life goes on; inside, they struggle to survive another day. Still, on a cold winter night, a group of Jewish actors manage to stage a lively musical comedy.

6.8

Kornblumenblau

Oct 9, 1989

Based on a true story of a Polish musician who survived the concentration camp only because he could play on the accordion the title melody.

6.0

After the Truth

Sep 23, 1999

Famous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele — the 'Death Angel of Auschwitz', who killed more than 300.000 people — emerges from his hideout in Argentina to Germany as a 87-year-old man, and must stand for his crimes in court. The young solicitor Peter Rohm is assigned to defend him, but Rohm himself — an expert on Mengele and his crimes — feels unable to do so. When he decides to take on the case, he endangers not only his marriage but also his and his wife's lives.

5.0

Ganef

Nov 2, 2020

Confusion escalates when a little girl thinks she sees her beloved family cleaner steal a precious ornament.

7.4

The Counterfeiters

Mar 22, 2007

The story of Jewish counterfeiter Salomon Sorowitsch, who was coerced into assisting the Nazi operation of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp during World War II.

4.1

Simon Schama: The Road to Auschwitz

Apr 7, 2025

In the most personal and unflinching film of his career, historian Simon Schama confronts the enormity of the Holocaust and the catastrophe experienced by its victims. In a journey that ends with his first visit to Auschwitz, Simon travels across the Continent to explore how the Holocaust was far more than a Nazi obsession that played out in gas chambers, but a European-wide crime of complicity. From bullets in the Lithuanian lands of his ancestors to bureaucracy in the Netherlands, he reveals how deep-rooted prejudice was weaponised to turn people against their Jewish neighbours. As a moving interview with a survivor reveals, the story of how ‘evil comes step by step’ remains powerfully relevant today.

4.0

There Is Many Like Us

May 5, 2015

In 1943, Max Fronenberg spent one year digging a secret underground tunnel to escape out of a prison camp in Warsaw, Poland during the Holocaust while saving fifteen other prisoners in the process and forced to leave behind the love of his life, Rena, in the prison.