Best movies like Conférence de Berlin 1885 - La ruée sur l'Afrique

Virunga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is Africa’s oldest national park, a UNESCO world heritage site, and a contested ground among insurgencies seeking to topple the government that see untold profits in the land. Among this ongoing power struggle, Virunga also happens to be the last natural habitat for the critically endangered mountain gorilla. The only thing standing in the way of the forces closing in around the gorillas: a handful of passionate park rangers and journalists fighting to secure the park’s borders and expose the corruption of its enemies. Filled with shocking footage, and anchored by the surprisingly deep and gentle characters of the gorillas themselves, Virunga is a galvanizing call to action around an ongoing political and environmental crisis in the Congo.

This documentary recounts the life and work of one of most famous, and yet reviled, German film directors in history, Leni Riefenstahl. The film recounts the rise of her career from a dancer, to a movie actor to the most important film director in Nazi Germany who directed such famous propaganda films as Triumph of the Will and Olympiad. The film also explores her later activities after Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945 and her disgrace for being so associated with it which includes her amazingly active life over the age of 90.

After Mobutu, King of Zaire and Congo River, the Belgian director Thierry Michel pursues his exploration of Central Africa. His new documentary, entitled Katanga Business, is a kind of political economic thriller, which takes place in this south-eastern province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the world’s richest regions in mining resources. While the inhabitants of Katanga continue to live in extreme poverty, multinationals are rivalled by China, newly arrived with its billions of dollars.

Tarzan, having acclimated to life in London, is called back to his former home in the jungle to investigate the activities at a mining encampment.

Recounted mostly through animation to protect his identity, Amin looks back over his past as a child refugee from Afghanistan as he grapples with a secret he’s kept hidden for 20 years.

The true story of the rise to power and brutal assassination of the formerly vilified and later redeemed leader of the independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba. Using newly discovered historical evidence, Haitian-born and later Congo-raised writer and director Raoul Peck renders an emotional and tautly woven account of the mail clerk and beer salesman with a flair for oratory and an uncompromising belief in the capacity of his homeland to build a prosperous nation independent of its former Belgian overlords. Lumumba emerges here as the heroic sacrificial lamb dubiously portrayed by the international media and led to slaughter by commercial and political interests in Belgium, the United States, the international community, and Lumumba's own administration; a true story of political intrigue and murder where political entities, captains of commerce, and the military dovetail in their quest for economic and political hegemony.

A Claude Lanzmann documentary about one uprising by Jews in a Nazi-run concentration camp taken from his Shoah interviews.

The story of the great Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) and his life and career during the rule of Stalin.

The Ethiopian intellectual Anberber returns to his native country during the repressive totalitarian regime of Haile Mariam Mengistu and the recognition of his own displacement and powerlessness at the dissolution of his people's humanity and social values. After several years spent studying medicine in Germany, he finds the country of his youth replaced by turmoil. His dream of using his craft to improve the health of Ethiopians is squashed by a military junta that uses scientists for its own political ends. Seeking the comfort of his countryside home, Anberber finds no refuge from violence. The solace that the memories of his youth provide is quickly replaced by the competing forces of military and rebelling factions. Anberber needs to decide whether he wants to bear the strain or piece together a life from the fragments that lie around him.

Why do the comic-strip Adventures of Tintin, about an intrepid boy reporter, continue to fascinate us decades after their publication? "Tintin and I" highlights the potent social and political underpinnings that give Tintin's world such depth, and delve into the mind of Hergé, Tintin's work-obsessed Belgian creator, to reveal the creation and development of Tintin over time. Rare and surprisingly candid 1970s interviews reveal the profound insecurities and anxieties that drove Hergé to produce stories that have not only entertained millions of children but also helped to satisfy a personal longing for self-expression.

A U.S. intelligence general recalls three Cold War cases of Soviet, French and Italian spies.

Cape Verde, 1964. At the feet of a mighty volcano, the traditional Cape Verdean society is undergoing a steady change. The old land-owning aristocracy is disintegrating. A class of "mulattos" begins to emerge, with a trade-based financial power that threatens the landlords. A new identity arises, a mix of old and new, of African and Portuguese culture, sensual and dynamic. The songs of Cesária Évora follow this inevitable transformation. From the novel by Henrique Teixeira de Sousa.

Domingos is a member of an African liberation movement, arrested by the Portuguese secret police, after bloody events in Angola. His wife goes from a prison station to another, trying in vain to find out where he is.

Footage of the investigation documentary telling about the extermination of African elephants lasted almost three years. The film crew traveled throughout 30 countries to make a route of ivory smuggling and to find out the true culprit of these crimes against elephants.

Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (currently Zambia), September 18th, 1961. Swedish Dag Hammarskjöld, UN Secretary-General, mysteriously dies in a plane crash. Decades later, Danish journalist and filmmaker Mads Brügger and Swedish researcher Göran Björkdahl investigate the case looking for a definitive closure.

To understand firsthand what the United States of America can learn from other nations, Michael Moore playfully “invades” some to see what they have to offer.

Dr. Karl Sternau, the personal physician of the count Bismarck, who spent much of his youth in Mexico, is sent back to that country during the occupation by French troops in the service of the Austrian 'Emperor' Maximilian, to carry an encouraging letter from U.S. President Lincoln to the nationalist Mexican president Benito Juarez.

The third and final instalment in the Burnout trilogy. This time, the road leads through Norway, to Sweden, Denmark and finally Germany to race on the famous racing track, Nürburgring.

In 1975, Ryszard Kapuściński, a veteran Polish journalist, embarked on a seemingly suicidal road trip into the heart of the Angola's civil war. There, he witnessed once again the dirty reality of war and discovered a sense of helplessness previously unknown to him. Angola changed him forever: it was a reporter who left Poland, but it was a writer who returned…

The story of the cross destiny of George Orwell (1903-50) and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), the genius authors of the two most groundbreaking novels of anticipation of the 20th century: 1984 and Brave New World; two lucid witnesses of the maledictions of the modern world whose novels have found a considerable echo with our time.

A multi-episode movie based on the skit TV show "bullyparade".

The humanitarian aid expedition "Angeles Azules" (Blue Angels), comprising twelve Europeans and six trucks loaded with provisions to alleviate hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa, advances across the continent. As a result of the difficulties the team encounters, disorganization gradually takes over the convoy. Each of the members of the group, little by little, yield to their petty, selfish impulses: violence, power, nostalgia - The breakdown of one of the trucks forces Michele and Nadia to wait at an oasis for the arrival of spare parts. But a starving local tribe settles threateningly near them. The chief of the tribe makes a speech they don't understand, which is followed by a macabre purification ceremony.

Whenever people are released from their society's constraints, there is the possibility that they will behave badly, at least according to the rules of the society they have left behind. This seems to have been particularly the case for Europeans living in colonial establishments in Africa and Asia. In this drama, based on a story by Stefan Zweig, Dr. Steiner (Andrzej Seweryn) was caught with his fingers in the till at a German hospital. Rather than prosecute him, they gave him the option of emigrating elsewhere. He chose to serve at a clinic in a remote part of Portuguese Goa. He has been on his best behavior for years, but when the beautiful wife (Fanny Ardant) of a diplomat comes to him asking for an abortion, he is tempted to ask for sexual favors in return, and his life swiftly goes out of control.

This true, astonishing story describes how King Leopold II of Belgium turned Congo into its private colony between 1885 and 1908. Under his control, Congo became a gulag labor camp of shocking brutality. Leopold posed as the protector of Africans fleeing Arab slave-traders but, in reality, he carved out an empire based on terror to harvest rubber.

The last shots had been fired in the First World War — but peace had yet to be made. Inspired by Margaret MacMillan’s acclaimed work of popular history, Paris 1919 takes us inside the most ambitious peace talks in history, revisiting the event with a vivid sense of narrative. Evoking a pivotal moment when peace seemed possible, director Paul Cowan reflects upon the hard-learned lessons of history.

Russia, 1917. After the abdication of Czar Nicholas II Romanov, the struggle for power confronts allies, enemies, factions and ideas; a ruthless battle between democracy and authoritarianism that will end with the takeover of the government by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

A guide to human history through its most audacious power grabs. From Julius Caesar to Napoleon; from Mussolini to the strongmen of the present day - we see how the world we know has been shaped by those who dream big.

Actor and writer Mark Gatiss embarks on a chilling journey through European horror cinema, from the silent nightmares of German Expressionism in the 1920s to the Belgian lesbian vampires in the 1970s, from the black-gloved killers of Italian bloody giallo cinema to the ghosts of the Spanish Civil War, and finally reveals how Europe's turbulent 20th century forged its ground-breaking horror tradition.

After twenty years in power, Vladimir Putin continues to implement his geopolitical strategy with Russia’s comeback on the big stage of world politics. He already announced his ambitions in 2007 – and still, it seems like the western governments were hit completely unprepared. What is behind this repeat of the Cold War?

More than twenty years after Vladimir Putin came to supreme power in Russia on May 7, 2000, Russian society is deeply divided. A young, modern generation opposes the growing repression by the regime, which still retains the support of many members of previous generations. Who are these ordinary citizens who dream of living in a different Russia? What price will they have to pay to achieve the freedom and justice they so desire?

There is an interlinking history of violent European colonialism and the cultural legacy of ethnographic collections in institutions. This documentary traces the progression of colonial history from the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 to the systematic elimination of cultural traditions, religions and lifeways which would occur sporadically through genocides and warfare until the early 20th century throughout the African continent—surveying the inquiries and movements for historical justice, the relationships between European institutions and colonial violence and following enduring struggles against these organisations to regain what was taken.

At a time when Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland have decided to move away from atomic energy and focus on renewable energy, France - the most nuclear-powered country in the world, with 70% of its electricity produced by its reactors - is planning to invest in new EPRs. Is this choice really compatible with the ecological transition? Although nuclear power plants do not emit CO2, their dismantling at the end of their life generates pollution of another kind: exponential quantities of contaminated waste, the reuse of which remains hypothetical and the storage of which is highly problematic. Not to mention the risk of disaster, as at Chernobyl or Fukushima.

The history of Europeans in North America, from the arrival of Columbus in 1492 to the business success of German immigrants such as Heinz, Strauss or Friedrich Trumpf, Donald Trump's grandfather. During the 19th century, thirty million people — Germans, Irish, Scots, Russians, Hungarians, Italians and many others — left the old continent, fleeing poverty, racism or political repression, hoping to make a fortune and realize the American dream.

A white-robed preacher wanders and sermonizes across African lands; European communists and CIA spies conspire out of mutual self-interest to engineer the appointment of an African bourgeois to a puppet government presidency; and a revolutionary group marches in exile.

Going beyond the occasional news clip from Burma, the acclaimed filmmaker, Anders Østergaard, brings us close to the video journalists who deliver the footage. Though risking torture and life in jail, courageous young citizens of Burma live the essence of journalism as they insist on keeping up the flow of news from their closed country.