Best movies like Days of '36

A documentary on the unrest in Ukraine during 2013 and 2014, as student demonstrations supporting European integration grew into a violent revolution calling for the resignation of President Viktor F. Yanukovich.

A US intelligence officer, stationed in Germany, is caught in a political dilemma when the Russians kidnap a young Army private, the son of prominent American businessman. In exchange for the soldier's return, the Russians attempt to barter a trade for an elderly German couple who they want for treason.

In 1988, Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet, due to international pressure, is forced to call a plebiscite on his presidency. The country will vote ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to Pinochet extending his rule for another eight years. Opposition leaders for the ‘No’ vote persuade a brash young advertising executive, René Saavedra, to spearhead their campaign. Against all odds, with scant resources and while under scrutiny by the despot’s minions, Saavedra and his team devise an audacious plan to win the election and set Chile free.

A young Anatolian Greek, entrusted with his family's fortune, loses it en route to Istanbul and dreams of going to America.

Athens 1966. Dimitris, 13, unexpectedly loses his father. Seeing his pampered mother collapse, the boy gets carried away and decides to skip childhood in order to stand by her. When he feels ready, he has to claim his mother back from an up-and-coming star of the military regime. A brutal coming-of-age story, where Dimitris reacts in vengeance, changing thus the course of Greek history...

A retelling of the Greek myth of Phaedra. In modern Greece, Alexis's father, an extremely wealthy shipping magnate, is married to the younger, fiery Phaedra. When Alexis meets his stepmother, sparks fly and the two begin an affair. What will the Fates bring this family? Alexis's roadster and the music of Bach figure in the conclusion.

This expansive Greek drama follows a troupe of theater actors as they perform around their country during World War II. While the production that they put on is entitled "Golfo the Shepherdess," the thespians end up echoing scenes from classic Greek tales in their own lives, as Elektra plots revenge on her mother for the death of her father, and seeks help from her brother, Orestes, a young anti-fascist rebel.

“White Boy Rick”, as he was called, was a novelty: A white teenager seemingly running a major inner-city drug operation. In May of 1987, 17-year-old Richard Wershe Jr. was charged with a non-violent, juvenile drug offense. By the time of his arrest he was already a Detroit legend, frequently making front-page headlines and leading the local television news. In this film, gangsters, hit men, journalists and federal agents struggle to explain why he remains in prison at nearly 50 years old. The possible explanation is more stunning than the crimes Wershe was alleged to have committed.

A young woman's desperate search for her abducted boyfriend draws her into the infamous Colonia Dignidad, a sect nobody ever escaped from.

David Carr is a British Communist who is unemployed. In 1936, when the Spanish Civil War begins, he decides to fight for the Republican side, a coalition of liberals, communists and anarchists, so he joins the POUM militia and witnesses firsthand the betrayal of the Spanish revolution by Stalin's followers and Moscow's orders.

Τwo sisters from the island of Andros, dubbed Little England because of its affluence, are both in love with the same man. Set in the Greek Civil War period and ending in the 1950s, the movie is based on the homonymous novel by Ioanna Karystiani.

Elia Kazan's 1953 film stars Fredric March as the owner of an impoverished circus in Communist-ruled Czechoslovokia who plots to flee across the border to freedom, taking his entire troupe of performers and wild animals with him. The cast also includes Gloria Grahame, Terry Moore, Cameron Mitchell, Richard Boone and Adolphe Menjou.

The Popular Front wins elections, the Spanish Civil War begins, and Hitler and Stalin are manipulating and spying. The brilliant exile, Fiodor Voronin, a general at 20, is the deputy at the White Russian Military Union, probably slated to replace the aging Général Dobrinsky soon. Fiodor's Greek wife, Arsinoé, paints and stays away from politics, befriending Communist neighbors. Her health declines; the attentive Fiodor arranges care and, against the backdrop of Stalin's Great Purge, considers his options. He plays a chess game in which love of country, love of Arsinoé, ideology, petty jealousies, and the machinations of power roil in matters of life and death.

A sultry assassin is the target of two separate operatives in this globe-trotting action flick shot on location in the Bahamas, Athens, Rome and Hong Kong.

Set during the Greek civil war. A villager is forced to leave his house and property and go to Thessaloniki with his daughter and son. They find refuge in an old building with hundreds of other people. They live a miserable life as the daughter becomes a whore, and the son has to work.

Damon is a thief who begins to question his beliefs after he meets Pythias, a liberal Athenian who believes all men are brothers.

Two Greek refugees fall in love, but their relationship is devastated by dictatorship and war.

A true story: The trial of judges Polizoidi and Tertseti for disobedience and their triumphant acquittal during the three men regency council, when king Othon of Greece was a minor. The cast of the film was enormous, with almost half of the theatrical people participating.

Nick is a writer in New York when he gets posted to a bureau in Greece. He has waited 30 years for this. He wants to know why his mother was killed in the civil war years earlier. In a parallel plot line we see Nick as a young boy and his family as they struggle to survive in the occupied Greek hillside. The plot lines converge as Nick's investigations bring him closer to the answers.

Underground is a 1976 documentary film about the Weathermen, founded as a militant faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), who fought to overthrow the U.S. government during the 1960s and 1970s. The film consists of interviews with members of the group after they went underground and footage of the anti-war and civil rights protests of the time. It was directed by Emile de Antonio, Haskell Wexler and Mary Lampson, later subpoenaed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in an attempt to confiscate the film footage in order to gain information that would help them arrest the Weathermen. (Wikipedia)

A gifted electrician, Michalis Karamanos works for Greek Telecommunications Organization and it seems that he is the only one who hasn't been completely absorbed by the corrupt and all-devouring system. Acting as a member of the revolutionary organization Constitutional Struggle, which is fighting against the unpopular policy of the government, he connects the computer of the director of OTE to an explosive device. He threatens to destroy the telecommunications of the country if he is not allowed to broadcast on television his revolutionary message during the broadcast of an important football game. The Authorities, thinking that he has gone crazy, try to bring him around using his old friends from the army, whom they pick up one by one as intermediaries. This is a situation comedy with excellent, mature plot development, plenty of suspense as well as masterful criticism of sociopolitical reality.

A universal theme: a story of people trapped in an inhuman network of power. The brutal circle of the Eurogroup meetings, who impose on Greece the dictatorship of austerity, where humanity and compassion are utterly disregarded. A claustrophobic trap with no way out, exerting pressures on the protagonists which finally divide them.

Rena Varlamou (Rena Vlahopoulou), a female queen and a captain, takes up the election campaign of her fiancé Pericles Arapis (Stavros Xenides), a tavern who has founded a party and wants to become a member. He tries to land him in reality, but he does not, and when Pericles is not elected, he takes off. The reason is the sudden death of the uncle of Iakovos Menexes, a political career, who had re-elected a Member on their island. Menexes had included it on his ballot, as a runner-up, and Rena took his place, becoming the first female MP and struggling to make some important works in her place.

The true-life, stranger-than-fiction tale of eighteenth-century Greek pirate turned merchant Ioannis Varvakis, who rose from humble beginnings to become the head of one of the largest mercantile empires in Europe.

4 years after the Nazi occupation in Greece, the Greeks are involved in a Civil War and they are killing each other. Theodoros, a quiet and modest man, disgusted and disappointed, falls asleep and has a nightmare. Hitler is alive and the Nazis strike back with new, more powerful weapons.

A wild tale of mistaken identity set during the Nazi occupation of Greece and starring the great Thanasis Vengos. Thanasis is called upon, during the Occupation, to testify at the trial of a tavern owner accused of serving cat meat to his customers. He too is accused of perjury and imprisoned with some resistance fighters. The resistance fighters escape, but Thanasis remains in his cell. He is accused of being Ivan, the notorious ringleader of certain revolutionaries.

The young daughter (Anna Synodinou) of a well-off family comes back from Switzerland after completing her studies, married to a young scientist, Thanasakis (Byron Pallis), who comes back to Greece determined to serve his country as a politician. With the financial support of his brother-in-law (Dinos Iliopoulos) he enters the election with no results. Soon though, another election is announced and he decides to run for a second time, again asking support from his brother-in-law who insists that a new campaign would be financial suicide for the family.

Alexander, a tribal warlord and former political prisoner, kidnaps British tourists, holding them for ransom until Britain and the Greek puppet government in Athens meet his demand for amnesty for his band of freedom fighters.

Based on the book by Ilias Venezis "The Number 31328", the film by Nikos Koundouros unfolds through the personal tragedies of three characters, the Asia Minor Disaster and the agonizing travails of the Asia Minor Greeks who had been arrested and led to death by Kemal's troops and armed groups of Muslims. The wife of a merchant, a teacher and a seventeen-year old boy try to survive, following the column of prisoners into the depths of Asia Minor.

An American couple in Chile is drawn into the turmoil that followed President Salvador Allende's 1973 overthrow.

A reporter notices an old man in a border town who may be an important Greek politician who disappeared mysteriously years ago.

During a hunting party on New Year's Eve 1976, five representatives of the bourgeoisie encounter with their companion the body of a partisan from the Civil War of the late forties. What they are most confused about is the fact that the corpse that lies at their feet is still bleeding…

The true story of a young couple (Babis and Eleni) fighting for love and freedom. An odyssey in and out of prisons during the dark period between the Greek civil war until the end of dictatorship in 1974

'Dalla nube alla resistenza (From the Cloud to the Resistance ) (1978), based on two works by Cesare Pavese, falls into the category of History Lessons and Too Early, Too Late as well. It, too, has two parts—a twentieth-century text and a text regarding the myths of antiquity, each set in the appropriate landscape. Pavese's The Moon and the Bonfires looks back on the violent deaths of Italian anti-Fascist resistance fighters; Dialogues with Leucò is a series of dialogues between heroes and gods, connecting myth and history and returning to an ambiguous stage in the creation of distinctions, such as that between animal and human, which are fundamental to grammar and language itself. Such a juxtaposition of political engagement with profoundly contemplative issues such as myth, nature, and meaning points to the characters of Empedocles and Antigone in the Hölderlin films.' (From "Landscapes of resistance. The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub" by Barton Byg)

A portrait of a brutal Pinochet military dictatorship made during a three month visit to Chile in 1985 by David Bradbury. The footage reveals a country torn with civil strife and political unrest; military intimidation of the population; indiscriminate arrests: murder torture and disappearances were facts of Chilean life.