This short celebrates the 20th anniversary of MGM. Segments are shown from several early hits, then from a number of 1944 releases.

Fields of France, during the First World War. A group of young soldiers, united by the indiscriminate brutality of battle, fights to maintain their humanity in an endless cycle of combat and death.

Nine fictitious documentaries and films reflect the mood of late 1970s Germany, particularly the two-month period in 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped by the RAF (Red Army Faction). The kidnap had been made to orchestrate the release of the original leaders of the RAF, aka the Baader-Meinhof.

In 208 A.D., in the final days of the Han Dynasty, shrewd Prime Minster Cao convinced the fickle Emperor Han the only way to unite all of China was to declare war on the kingdoms of Xu in the west and East Wu in the south. Thus began a military campaign of unprecedented scale. Left with no other hope for survival, the kingdoms of Xu and East Wu formed an unlikely alliance.

The Hobbit Enigma examines one of the greatest controversies in science today: what did scientists find when they uncovered the tiny, human-like skeleton of a strange creature, known to many as the Hobbit, on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003?

A young American soldier, rendered in pseudocoma from an artillery shell from WWI, recalls his life leading up to that point.

As Australian cinema broke through to international audiences in the 1970s through respected art house films like Peter Weir's "Picnic At Hanging Rock," a new underground of low-budget exploitation filmmakers were turning out considerably less highbrow fare. Documentary filmmaker Mark Hartley explores this unbridled era of sex and violence, complete with clips from some of the scene's most outrageous flicks and interviews with the renegade filmmakers themselves.

During World War I, English officer Thomas Edward 'T.E.' Lawrence sets out to unite and lead the diverse, often warring, Arab tribes to fight the Turks.

A commanding officer defends three scapegoats on trial for a failed offensive that occurred within the French Army in 1916.

A group of French soldiers, including the patrician Captain de Boeldieu and the working-class Lieutenant Maréchal, grapple with their own class differences after being captured and held in a World War I German prison camp. When the men are transferred to a high-security fortress, they must concoct a plan to escape beneath the watchful eye of aristocratic German officer von Rauffenstein, who has formed an unexpected bond with de Boeldieu.

The life of a Russian physician and poet who, although married to another, falls in love with a political activist's wife and experiences hardship during World War I and then the October Revolution.

Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.