Ken, a WWII GI, returns home after he's paralyzed in battle. Residing in the paraplegic ward of a veteran's hospital and embittered by his condition, he refuses to see his fiancée and sinks into a solitary world of hatred and hostility. Head physician, Dr. Brock cajoles the withdrawn Ken into the life of the ward, where fellow patients Norm, Leo and Angel begin to pull him out of his spiritual dilemma.
Leonid Pleshcheyev returned from the war blind. Against his will, he became a dependent. He drowns his grief in unrestrained drunkenness, thereby tormenting his wife Mariya and his teenage son Lyonka. Mariya finally decides to take her son and leave for Altai, but the boy runs away and returns to his father. So, together, they eke out a half-miserable existence until Grigoriy Shalagin, Pleshcheyev's longtime friend, returns from the army. It is he who awakens in Leonid the extinct self-esteem and pride of a soldier. Pity aside, he helps him get back to work.
June 1944. In the newly liberated Rome, Roberto Rossellini and Sergio Amidei decide, against all odds, to make an unprecedented, true-to-life film on the tragic events that occurred during the Nazi occupation: Rome, Open City .
The residents of Ho Chi Minh City face modernization amid widespread poverty. A retired American Marine arrives on a search for his daughter, whom he abandoned at the end of the Vietnam War. Elsewhere, a cyclo driver falls for a troubled prostitute and schemes to raise money so he can spend time with her. Additionally, a young women begins harvesting lotuses for a writer suffering from leprosy, and a child trinket seller loses his traveling case.
A teenaged girl witnesses her widowed mother's attempt to sustain her family.
Post-war provincial Iceland: around 1950, Freyja, who'd been a plump teen, returns from America, a widow with a 20-inch waist, seven suitcases of dresses, and a list of who ever wronged or slighted her. She moves in with an aunt and socialist uncle: finding a new husband is high on her agenda, and she's mistrusted by Agga, a pre-teen who's our eyes and ears. The social order and Freyja are more complicated than they seem at first, and so may be her prospects. Class divisions, families ties, pride, the onset of puberty, and the power of Eros sliver the ice.
The effortlessly comic abandons the stress of his city job to work on a farm.
Post-war Germany in 1946 while people are struggling to make ends meet, the film follows Hermann, a war veteran who finds employment at a train station. As he falls in love with an agricultural worker and starts comitting thefts, his fragile psyche seems to fall more and more out of balance.
In the underground of a besieged city, a soldier awaits his fate. Meanwhile, in the ruins of the surface, the dangerous Cannibal runs wild.
Immediately after the prom, Olya Rusanova arrives in the city where her father worked and tragically died. Many years ago he dreamed of building a city, and now she is walking along the street bearing his name, a street without end. Having met her father’s friends, Olya learns him anew. They tell the girl how her father wanted to see large houses and wide streets on the site of the tent city. How he knew how to be friends and to love, and how longed for Olya when he broke up with his wife, who didn't agree to go with him.
An Army veteran finds his re-entry into civilian life easier through the efforts of his younger brother and a donkey.
After the fall of the Third Reich, the small town of Tannbach is cruelly divided between East and West regimes and the town’s inhabitants suffer the consequences. A gripping historical drama exploring the devastating effects decades of conflict had on communities from the end of the Second War War to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Revolving around the life of un-produced screenwriter Barnum Nilsen, The Half Brother is a dramatic family saga that offers an historical parable of 20th century Europe. On V Day, May 1945, as a continent emerges from war, Barnum’s mother Vera is raped in her attic in Oslo by an unknown man, leading to the birth of Barnum’s half brother, Fred. When Barnum is born five years later, to the man that Vera has since met and married, the Nilsen family, like Europe, is already splitting in two. Growing up together during the Cold War – Barnum with his father, Fred searching for his – the half brothers become estranged and Fred eventually disappears. At the film festival in Berlin in 1990, as the Wall is still coming down, Barnum learns that Fred has returned. Finally, as the true identity of Fred’s father comes to light, the two half brothers may once again be reunited.
