It's 1942 and eight-year-old Bruno knows nothing of Germany's Final Solution and the Holocaust, only that his father was promoted and he has been moved from a comfortable home in Berlin to a house in a desolate area. Here there is nothing to do and no one to play with, that is until he meets Shmuel, a boy who lives a strange parallel existence on the other side of a wire fence, and who, like the other people there, wears a uniform of striped pyjamas. Bruno's friendship with Shmuel takes him from find out more...

Guinness restores the morale of British PoWs by building a bridge which is of military value to the Japanese, and then attempts to thwart the RAF's destruction of it! A classic film which swept 7 Oscars including "Best Picture". find out more...

Colditz was the P-O-W camp where the Germans put the bad boys, the prisoners, Brits of course, who repeatedly tried to escape. This is their story; a first class tale with British stiff-upper-lips to the fore, nationalistic but heroic. find out more...

The greatest prisoner of war adventure of them all. Behind the barbed wire fences of Stalag Luft the Allies plan a mass break-out by digging three tunnels. Discovery by the Germans when only one is completed means the chances of escape are thin. Yet 76 make the attempt in this epic adventure.

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While serving in the Second World War, British Army officer Eric Lomax is captured and held prisoner by the Japanese. He is brutally tortured and forced, along with his fellow captives, to build the Thai-Burma Railway. Many years later he is still traumatised by the experience and when the opportunity arises to track down one of his torturers Eric pursues the find out more...

The Road To Guantanamo is the story, (part dramatic reconstruction/part documentary), of four friends who set off from the Midlands in September 2001 for an innocent wedding and holiday in Pakistan. Two and a half years later, only three of them returned home. find out more...

'The Round Up' takes place within a detention camp in the remote Hungarian countryside, after the collapse of the 1848 revolution against Austrian domination. A formal variation on the main patterns of ritual power, director Jansco deliberately side-steps revolutionary heroics and focuses on the persecutions and de-humanizations, which always accompany conflict, and makes 'an almost abstract statement of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed'... there are only losers and survivors. find out more...

A truly terrible sub-TV film, supposedly based round the diaries of Captain Ernest Gordon, a survivor of the infamous "Railway of Death". Despite the reality of the experiences these British, Aussie and American prisoners stay remarkably well fed, free of jungle sores etc, while occasionally acting incredibly stupidly, having very nasty things done to them, making self-sacrifices, learning the harsh side of Bushido and spouting incredibly rubbishy meaning of life statements. find out more...

Bresson's remarkable and detailed account of the brilliantly conceived escape of imprisoned and condemned to death real-life resistance fighter Andre Devigny. The intensity of the direction is augmented superbly by the music; Mozart's Mass in C Minor. Superb. find out more...

Olympian Louis “Louie” Zamperini, along with two other crewmen, survive in a raft for 47 days after a near-fatal plane crash while on a bombing raid in WWII, but it is when they are caught by the Japanese and sent to prisoner of war camp that Louis’ endurance test really begins. A rather ‘worthy’ dramatisation of the man’s biopic. 

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