Prague 1942. Following the assassination of Nazi "Reich Protector" Heydrich, Masha Novotny, a professor's daughter, hides the culprit in her parents' apartment. When the Gestapo take 400 people hostage in retaliation, Masha's father is among those arrested. The assassin, surgeon Dr. Svoboda, manages to escape. As they search for him the Gestapo also train their sights on Masha. While hostages are being executed daily, she helps Svoboda in his efforts to blame the assassination on a collaborator and save her father's life..

This avant-garde classic, made in collaboration with husband Alexander Hammid, is an important piece of feminist filmmaking. Of the film, with its subjective camera movement, jump cuts, and visual repetition, Deren wrote, "[it] is concerned with the inner realities of the individual and the way in which the subconscious will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and causal occurrence into a critical emotional experience." Here in its original version, it is presented intentionally silent.

More women worked in film during its first two decades than at any time since. Unfortunately, many early women filmmakers have been largely written out of film history, their contributions undervalued. This necessary and timely collection highlights the work of 14 of early cinema's most innovative and influential women directors, re-writing and celebrating their rightful place in film history. International in scope, this groundbreaking collection features over 10 hours of material, comprised of 24 films spanning 1902-1943, including many rare titles not widely available until now, from shorts to feature films, live-action to animation, commercial narratives to experimental works. Directors include Alice Guy Blaché, Lois Weber, Mabel Normand, Madeline Brandeis, Germaine Dulac, Olga Preobrazhenskaia, Marie-Louise Iribe, Lotte Reiniger, Claire Parker, Mrs. Wallace Reid (Dorothy Davenport), Leni Riefenstahl, Mary Ellen Bute, Dorothy Arzner, and Maya Deren.

A physician, alchemist, and spiritual guru, PARACELSUS (1493-1541) was one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of science. And, like its subject, this 1943 film is shrouded in mystery, even though it was directed by one of the supreme stylists of the German cinema: G.W. Pabst. Werner Krauss (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) stars as the Swiss-born scientist, who faces the seemingly impossible task of protecting the German people from a coming plague, and calming a rising tide of mass hysteria. Despite being called "a remarkably interesting film" by The New York Times's Vincent Canby (when it received its belated U.S. premiere in 1974), PARACELSUS continues to be overlooked, along with most all of the films made in Germany during World War II. With fresh eyes, however, we can see that PARACELSUS is not a propaganda film, but the work of an oppressed artist attempting to convey a humanist, possibly subersive message under the gaze of Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.

Western legends Pat Garrett, Doc Holliday and Billy the Kid are played against each other over the law and the attentions of vivacious country vixen Rio McDonald.

A dramatisation of the work of the National Fire Service during the Fire Blitz of the winter and spring of 1940/41. Directed by Humphrey Jennings.

This lavish, impudent, adult fairy tale takes the viewer from 18th-century Braunschweig to St. Petersburg, Constantinople, Venice, and then to the moon using ingenious special effects, stunning location shooting, and a rich color palette, supervised by cameraman Konstantin Irmen-Tschet, who had worked for Fritz Lang in earlier Ufa films.

Before James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster Titanic, the Hollywood Titanic of 1953, the 1958 British film A night to remember, and the 1997 Broadway musical Titanic, there was the Nazi German film Titanic. A Tobis production begun in 1942, this production nearly sank as decisively as the doomed ocean liner. The film's director, Herbert Selpin, infuriated with the slow second-unit shooting in the port of Gdynia, was overheard making remarks damning the German army. Reported to the Gestapo, Selpin was arrested and later found hanging in his prison cell, the victim of an arranged "suicide. "In April, 1943, the film was banned by the Berlin censors for German release because of its terrifying scenes of panic, all too familiar to German civilians undergoing nightly Allied bombing raids. After extensive cutting, Titanic was released in occupied Paris and a few army installations. The film was seen in Germany finally in late 1949, but banned a few months later in the Western sectors (though not in the Soviet zone, because of its unmistakable anti-British-capitalist theme). Technically, this Titanic is an excellent catastrophe film; its shots of the ship sinking were later used by the 1958 British film without credit. Somewhat true to the facts, though peppered with fictional good Germans both on and below deck, in steerage, the film ends with a trial scene that aquits the White Star Line management, followed by a final slide denouncing England's "eternal quest for profit." These packed a powerful propaganda punch; cut from the postwar prints, they have been restored for this version.