The film is a documentary portraying a struggle as man tries to subdue nature. To prevent flooding and for purposes of land reclamation, the people of the Netherlands struggle and succeed in building a breaker, thereby eliminating the wild inland body of water once known as the Zuider Zee (now...
The 400 million people of China are heirs to a great civilization, as their pagodas and stone lions can attest. But they are under attack from the Japanese. Civilian refugees walk, stumble, crawl to escape the destruction of their cities... While in the China of tradition, water buffalo still work...
The Hefbrug may not be a remarkably beautiful bridge, but through a mix of close-ups, long shots, bird’s eye views and low angles, Joris Ivens conveys a sense of the bridge’s structure, its intricate mechanisms and ways of operating, the way it fits into the overall transport infrastructure and...
A documentary about Italy's underground oil and metan deposits, sponsored by Italian state-owned oil company, ENI. Pictures of the state-of-the-art oil infrastructure are mixed with others of the traditional way of living of poorer Italian regions.
An industrial film which shows the operations inside the Philips Radio plant: In a mêlée of activity, glassblowers make delicate glass bulbs. Machinery assists the bulb manufacture. A virtuoso glassblower begins a more complex tube used in radio broadcasting; it is then turned, fired, and...
Instructional film about the (former) biggest harbour in the world, with a hybrid format. Well known Ivens themes are revisited, like The Flying Dutchman in the fiction part of the film, who returns to the modern day Rotterdam, that has recovered very well after the devastating bombardments in the...
Through the files of Cuban cinema news program Noticieros ICAIC Latinoamericanos, the documentary shows the most relevant events of the second half of the 20th century as seen by the documentary filmmakers of the island. During three decades and under the general direction of Santiago Álvarez,...
This film describes the Second World Congress of Peace Defenders, held in Warsaw on November 16-22, 1950. Sheffield, an industrial city in England, was the initial location of the event, however, it was transferred to the capital of Poland at the very last moment.
Using footage taken by Soviet battlefront cameramen, this penetrating documentary about Russian life during World War II is narrated by Walter Huston and features the likes of Joseph Stalin and Marshal Timoshenko.
Two weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945, Indonesian Independence leaders proclaimed “Indonesia Merdeka!” ‘Freedom for Indonesia’ and an end to Dutch colonial rule over the Netherlands East Indies. Internationally renowned Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, in...
