Zalina Bogazova, 16, was a pupil at the school in the Russian republic of North Ossetia when the terrorist attack took place last year. She managed to escape but her mother and sister were killed. When she tells her story in front of the camera there is no sign of aggression or the desire for revenge, instead there is deep sorrow and reflection about how life is to go on.
   The film was created by three school youths, 16 and 17 years of age, from Beslan and was awarded a special prize from UNICEF in December 2004 at a Film Festival on Human Rights in STALKER in Moscow. "This film is our contribution to fighting terrorism", say the girls in the introduction to the film.
   The girls wrote the essay "Beslan - How we suddenly became older" for the inauguration of our festival. The entire text can be read at the beginning of the programme folder. Here is an extract:

"On that morning any one of us could have been there, in their place. We all went to our school just like this, waited for the first bell of the term just like this, and we thought that monsters and dragons only existed in fairy tales. But the fairy tales were changed to deliberate, ugly reality. Had the stories changed, or had we become more adult?"
(Extract from: "Beslan, - how we suddenly became older")

In Hitler's Hit Parade there are few images of the consequences of Nazism. The director chooses instead to dive right into the Third Reich's then dominant societal spirit and to show a prosperous German people who find themselves right in the midst of a technological and cultural upswing where modernity and culture in the form of music, dance, film and theater occupy a central place. And there Nazism's ideas slowly begin to germinate until in the end they permeate all cultural life.
The film is a collage of archival material and is divided into different thematic chapters. Every chapter is accompanied by period music, which sometimes goes hand in hand with the images and sometimes serves as a very sharp contract.
   In two places in the film we get to meet the Swede Zarah Leander, right in the midst of a German career.
   The film has been distinguished in a number of reviews: "This German documentary gathers some of the products of the German culture industry from the 1930's and 40's into a monstrous and fascinating collage", writes A.O Scott in the New York Times, 5 January 2005. "It´s a provocative study of seductive propaganda techniques,a partial explanation of the riddle of mass German support for Hitler" Tuesday, January 11, www.cnn.com.

Jozef Lewandowskiwas a part of the extensive Jewish fellowship in the city of Konin in Poland. When he is 16 years old, in 1939, the Jewish roots are pulled up out of his hometown and people are executed or deported. Before the Second World War, a third of the city's inhabitants are Jews; of these five percent survive. During a return visit to his hometown, Lewandowski wanders by still-standing house facades, visits his old school, library and the remains of the Jewish cemetery. Here he experienced his first true love, love for the esthetic and for Polish literature. Despite a poor upbringing with one foot in the Jewish culture and the other in the Polish, the city nonetheless provided a stable ground, a ground which has now begun to move under his feet.
   Jozef Lewandowski lives in Sweden and is professor of history at the University of Uppsala.

The film received a prize at the 5th International Days of Documentary Cinema "Europe's Point of Divergence/Convergence, Europe's borders" in April 2004, in Lublin, Poland.

   Read also Leo Kantor's article about their meeting in Svenska Dagbladet's culture section "Ett handslag i Auschwitz" ("A Handshake in Auschwitz") from May 2, 2004, and Svante Weyler's interview with Martin Bormann, "Bödelns son" ("The Executioner's Son"), in Expressen culture, May, 7, 2004.

An ordinary German joins the Hitler Youth and then becomes one of Germany's soldiers during the Second World War. And this documentary film would probably never have been made had it not been for two items in the soldier's pack; a camera and a diary. With the camera, he documents his soldier friends, his day-to-day life, his loved ones, the environments and people they meet and some of the people they shoot. When the war is over and he is living in East Berlin, the camera is turned on him and in 1956 he was executed by the Russians.

The film received a special prize at the Russian National Documentary Film Festival in Ekaterinburg in October 2004.

Being a neighbour of the communist Soviet and also a strategic piece in Hitler's struggle for power had catastrophic consequences for the Ukraine. After being subjected to Stalin's contrived famine of the 1920s and 1930s, when 8 million people starved or were murdered, the Ukraine is soon squeezed in between 2 fronts belonging to two of the world's most brutal regimes. During the Second World War, 10 million Ukrainians lose their lives; the country is emptied of resources and devastated.
   Between Hitler and Stalin is the second film from "The Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentations Centre" and focuses on the Ukraine's difficult history during the Second World War. The first film, Sorgeskörden (Harvest of Sorrow) (1984) is about the artificial famine and is to be shown outside the general festival programme.