A Chinese soldier's tale; Guzidi was a child of poverty who became a successful guerrilla soldier and then officer in the Liberation Army. After a fierce battle with the KMT Guzidi and his remaining 46 troops are sent to a front line defensive position, where they are abandoned by the main army corps to a fight to the death. After a heroic act in the Korean War Guzidi, riddled with guilt and loss of meaningful identity, fights a long battle to atone for the loss of his company by gaining recogni find out more...

Elem Klimov's powerful, mesmerising and dynamic award winning feature has been deservedly hailed as one of the greatest war films ever produced. find out more...

Knowing that his father had been some sort of WW2 war hero writer James Bradley set out to discover the truth about him and the fellow marines who raised the flag over Iwo Jima for the now infamously 'fraudulent' photgraph. We follow this ironically socially heterogeneous group of men through the horrors of one of the most bloody battles of WW2, interspliced with the early return home of three of the 'heroes' to act as politically manipulated cheerleaders for further fundraising to continue the find out more...

Based on the novel 'Post Mortem: The Story of Katyn' by Andrzej Mularczyk this film tells the horrific story of the 1940 Soviet NKVD's massacre, and subsequent cover-up, of an estimated 22,000, mainly Polish, military officers, police and intellectuals. Rarely does a film about the horrors of organised genocide achieve in its representation such an honest and harrowing account of crimes against humanity. find out more...

Guillermo Del Toro's blockbusting tale of a young girl struggling to make sense of the violent world around her was a big 2006 arthouse hit. Continuing his exploration of the impact of the Spanish Civil War on his generation (it was also the backdrop for his excellent ghost story, The Devil's Backbone) Del Toro's fantasy mixes strong horror with fairytale-style aesthetics to great effect, making Ofelia's escape into an imaginary realm a poignant response to the cruel realities of her existence. find out more...

'L'armée du Crime' focuses on the French Resistance ‘Manouchian group', Paris-based communists, led by the Armenian poet Missak Manouchian, and consisting of Jews, Hungarians, Poles and others who helped the armed struggle against Nazi occupation. The film describes the radicalisation and differing motives of Manouchian and his comrades and the execution of their mission – an ultimately fatal one as we know from the 22 names read out over the opening credits to the refrain of ‘Mort pour la Franc find out more...