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

Kurt Gerstein—a member of the Institute for Hygiene of the Waffen-SS—is appalled to discover that a poison gas he helped discover is being used to kill Jews. Driven by his conscience to alert the rest of the world, Gerstein teams up with a young Jesuit priest, Riccardo Fontana, but their protestations fall on deaf ears in the Vatican.

7.3

Train of Life

Sep 16, 1998

In 1941, the inhabitants of a small Jewish village in Central Europe organize a fake deportation train so that they can escape the Nazis and flee to Palestine.

7.0

Charlie Grant's War

Jan 27, 1985

A Canadian artist turned diamond merchant in Vienna, Austria risks his life to smuggle Jews out of the Third Reich.

6.0

Mendel

Mar 20, 1998

A Jewish family leaves Germany after surviving the Holocaust and heads to Norway. Mendel, their youngest son, is too young to make sense of the Holocaust but tries to comprehend his family's actions during the war and their nightmares now. His imagination frequently runs away from him.

0.0

Elie Wiesel Goes Home

Feb 12, 1997

A documentary chronicling the adolescent years of Elie Wiesel and the history of his sufferings. Eliezer was fifteen when Fascism brutally altered his life forever. Fifty years later, he returns to Sighetu Marmatiei, the town where he was born, to walk the painful road of remembrance - but is it possible to speak of the unspeakable? Or does Auschwitz lie beyond the capacity of any human language - the place where words and stories run out?

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.

6.3

Charlotte

Apr 22, 2022

The true story of Charlotte Salomon, a young German-Jewish painter who comes of age in Berlin on the eve of the Second World War. Fiercely imaginative and deeply gifted, she dreams of becoming an artist. Her first love applauds her talent, which emboldens her resolve. When anti-Semitic policies inspire violent mobs, she escapes to the safety of the South of France. There she begins to paint again, and finds new love. But her work is interrupted, this time by a family tragedy that reveals an even darker secret. Believing that only an extraordinary act will save her, she embarks on the monumental adventure of painting her life story.

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.

4.1

The Memory Thief

Apr 14, 2007

A Los Angeles tollbooth clerk becomes obsessed with the Holocaust after meeting a survivor.

8.4

Life Is Beautiful

Dec 20, 1997

A touching story of an Italian book seller of Jewish ancestry who lives in his own little fairy tale. His creative and happy life would come to an abrupt halt when his entire family is deported to a concentration camp during World War II. While locked up he tries to convince his son that the whole thing is just a game.

7.0

St. Louis

Oct 21, 2019

Hamburg, Germany, 1939. Getting a passage aboard the passenger liner St. Louis seems to be the last hope of salvation for more than nine hundred German Jews who, desperate to escape the atrocious persecution to which they are subjected by the Nazi regime, intend to emigrate to Cuba.

8.4

The Pianist

Sep 17, 2002

The true story of pianist Władysław Szpilman's experiences in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. When the Jews of the city find themselves forced into a ghetto, Szpilman finds work playing in a café; and when his family is deported in 1942, he stays behind, works for a while as a laborer, and eventually goes into hiding in the ruins of the war-torn city.

8.6

Schindler's List

Dec 15, 1993

The true story of how businessman Oskar Schindler saved over a thousand Jewish lives from the Nazis while they worked as slaves in his factory during World War II.

0.0

Łódź Ghetto

Mar 22, 1989

The Polish city of Łódź was under Nazi occupation for nearly the entirety of WWII. The segregation of the Jewish population into the ghetto, and the subsequent horrors are vividly chronicled via newsreels and photographs. The narration is taken almost entirely from journals and diaries of those who lived–and died–through the course of the occupation, with the number of different narrators diminishing as the film progresses, symbolic of the death of each narrator.

0.0

Requiem for Auschwitz - the film

Aug 2, 2022

13 years ago, director Bob Entrop made the film A piece of blue in the sky, the first film in the Netherlands that depicted the murder of almost 1 million Sinti and Roma during the Second World War. There is a taboo on what happened during the war, you don't talk about it with anyone and certainly not in front of a camera. Requiem for Auschwitz is a sequel, with the most valuable moments from the first film, supplemented with the grandchildren and the creation and performance of the 'Requiem for Auschwitz' by Sinti composer Roger Moreno Rathgeb by the Sinti and Roma Philharmonic from Frankfurt and a Jewish choir in the Berliner Dom in Berlin, during Holocaust Memorial Day. During his visit to Auschwitz in 2020 with four musicians from the Dutch Accompaniment Orchestra, Roger shows them the places that inspired him.

7.2

Stanisław Lem: Autor Solaris

Nov 2, 2016

An account of the life and work of the Polish writer Stanisław Lem (1921-2006), a key figure in science fiction literature involved in mysteries and paradoxes that need to be enlightened.

8.0

Poland 1939: When German Soldiers Became War Criminals

Aug 31, 2019

September 1st, 1939. Nazi Germany invades Poland. The campaign is fast, cruel and ruthless. In these circumstances, how is it that ordinary German soldiers suddenly became vicious killers, terrorizing the local population? Did everyone turn into something worse than wild animals? The true story of the first World War II offensive that marks in the history of infamy the beginning of a carnage and a historical tragedy.

5.7

Butterflies Do Not Live Here

Feb 25, 1958

A documentary about the life of Jewish children forced to live in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

7.6

The Most Precious of Cargoes

Nov 20, 2024

Once upon a time, a poor woodcutter and his wife lived in a great forest. Cold, hunger, poverty, and a war raging all around them meant their lives were very hard. One day, the woodcutter's wife rescues a baby. A baby girl thrown from one of the many trains that constantly pass through the forest. This baby, this "most precious of cargoes", will transform the lives of the poor woodcutter's wife and her husband, as well as those whose paths the child will cross—including the man who threw her from the train. And some will try to protect her, whatever the cost. Their story will reveal the worst and the best in the hearts of men.

7.0

The Zone of Interest

Dec 15, 2023

The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp.