Beamafilm for ANZAC Day

Beamafilm continues to grow its collection of brilliant ANZAC and other war-themed movies and documentaries. Here are just a few I thought looked particularly interesting.

There are some amazing filmmakers working with animation. In This Corner of the World is the story of Suzu, who moves to a small town near Hiroshima in 1944,where she marries a clerk at a nearby naval base. The story includes the air raids on Japan and the devastating effects of the atomic bombs and the end of the war. The movie, based on a book by Fumiyo Kōno, was released in 2016.

In Monsieur Mayonnaise, Philippe Mora delves into his father’s story in the French Resistance during World War II. Along with mime artist, Marcel Marceau, the two saved thousands of Jewish lives with a cunning ruse involving baguettes and mayonnaise. Mora, an artist as well as a filmmaker, tells the story in a variety of media, creating a graphic novel and paintings as he traces his father’s war story.

Beneath Hill 60 from 2010 is based on the extraordinary true story of a secret platoon of Australian tunnellers on the Western Front, during WWI. Beneath German lines, the men, mostly civilian miners, battle to maintain a leaking, maze of tunnels, deep underground and full of high explosives. This almost forgotten story makes for a nail-biting drama and is based on the book by Will Davies: Beneath Hill 60: The Extraordinary True Story of the Secret War Being Waged Beneath the Trenches of the Western Front.

Starring Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth, The Railway Man is a POW survival story set during and after WWII. Eric, once tortured by a Japanese officer, decides to confront the man years later when he learns he is alive. This dramatic story from the notorious Burma-Siam Railway, is based on the biography of Eric Lomax, and it deals with a variety of themes, from war trauma to acceptance and forgiveness.

Winston Churchill was a key figure in both World War I and World War II, as we know. The movie Churchill stars Brian Cox and Miranda Richardson in the story of the difficult decisions faced by the prime minister in the period leading up to the D-Day landings of June 1944.

The documentary Winston Churchill: Walking with Destiny details the period of the politician’s early opposition to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement and his support for Jewish people under the Nazi regime. This was an unpopular view at the time for a nation still hurting from the losses of WWI, and he was considered a war monger.

Based on a true story, The Pilot: a battle for survival is a Russian movie from 2021 that takes us to the Northwestern Front in 1941. It’s winter when Nikolai Komlev’s IL-2 is shot down behind enemy lines during a mission to stop the German advance. An edge-of-the-seat survival tale ensues with plenty of live action footage – tanks, air battles, wolves and snow.

There’s plenty more enthralling viewing to discover on Beamafilm, which you can find via the library website. Create a login with your library card number. If you have a smart TV, you can download the Beamafilm app. You can also use the Beamfilm website to search for what your want to watch to make a playlist.

For ANZAC viewing, go to the Subjects heading at the top of the screen. Click on the dropdown to History, with a further dropdown list for Military History, for a wide selection of war-themed movies, TV series and documentaries. Happy viewing!

Posted by JAM

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