Dirty Heroes

In Fascist Albania 1942, Albanian partisans will do all they can to remove the Italian fascists from their country.

Vlash Zaka is a poor villager who secures his living by capturing wild horses in the forest. His brother has killed an Italian spy, so Vlash is under surveillance and his life is in danger.

Nebi Surreli lives in poverty along with his mother. Doing small jobs to earn a living, he also helps his town's communist unit.

Hitler no longer believes in himself, and can barely see himself as an equal to even his sheep dog. But to seize the helm of the war he would have to create one of his famous fiery speeches to mobilize the masses. Goebbels therefore brings a Jewish acting teacher Grünbaum and his family from the camps in order to train the leader in rhetoric. Grünbaum is torn, but starts Hitler in his therapy ...

War tests human character severely, because the slightest suspicion of failure is hard to live with. A resistance worker who finds himself in such a situation would rather sacrifice his own life in order to dispel once and for all the doubts of those around him. Thus an agitprop was created about the moral maturity of those who consciously and from the right class positions fought against Nazism.

In Paris in full German occupation in 1942, a Jewish child Isaac escapes a raid organized by the SS. He then took refuge in the Great Mosque of Paris. The imam decides to protect him by passing him off as a Muslim, as well as the other Jewish children that he manages to free with the help of the resistance networks. The French militia and the Gestapo have suspicions... This fiction film is based on the true story of the rector of the Paris mosque, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, who saved several Jews from deportation during the Second World War.

Bardhi, an orphan boy, goes to the city to work in the house of a rich man, where he learns how to play the violin.

The story of Jewish counterfeiter Salomon Sorowitsch, who was coerced into assisting the Nazi operation of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp during World War II.

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.

May 1944, a group of French servicewomen and resistance fighters are enlisted into the British Special Operations Executive commando group under the command of Louise Desfontaines and her brother Pierre. Their mission, to rescue a British army geologist caught reconnoitering the beaches at Normandy.

A group of French soldiers, including the patrician Captain de Boeldieu and the working-class Lieutenant Maréchal, grapple with their own class differences after being captured and held in a World War I German prison camp. When the men are transferred to a high-security fortress, they must concoct a plan to escape beneath the watchful eye of aristocratic German officer von Rauffenstein, who has formed an unexpected bond with de Boeldieu.

At a village railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia, a bumbling dispatcher’s apprentice longs to liberate himself from his virginity. Oblivious to the war and the resistance that surrounds him, this young man embarks on a journey of sexual awakening and self-discovery, encountering a universe of frustration, eroticism, and adventure within his sleepy backwater depot.

The classic story of English POWs in Burma forced to build a bridge to aid the war effort of their Japanese captors. British and American intelligence officers conspire to blow up the structure, but Col. Nicholson, the commander who supervised the bridge's construction, has acquired a sense of pride in his creation and tries to foil their plans.

It's the hope that sustains the spirit of every GI: the dream of the day when he will finally return home. For three WWII veterans, the day has arrived. But for each man, the dream is about to become a nightmare.

After a failed anti-Nazi sabotage mission leaves his eleven comrades dead, a Norwegian resistance fighter finds himself fleeing the Gestapo through the snowbound reaches of Scandinavia.

Part of the Canada Carries On series, this short film portrays the First Division of the Canadian Active Service Force in Aldershot, England. Using an intimate letter home as a narrative device, this film reveals how the troops were received, what their living conditions were like, how they would get along with their English allies and how they spent their leisure time.