S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), United Red Army (2007), The Great Dictator (1940), The Lives of Others (2006), V for Vendetta (2005), The Wave (2008), Camp 14: Total Control Zone (2012), Equilibrium (2002) ... Let's take a look at the ranked list of the best Totalitarianism movies.
Storyline: This documentary, directed by a survivor of the genocide, chronicles the systematized murder perpetuated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, specifically the torture and killing of the educated classes in the notorious S-21 prison, which is now a museum. But this film is not about statistics and generalized history. Instead, it focuses on two survivors who return to the prison, coming face-to-face with some of the guards who insist that they were only following bureaucratic orders.
Plot Keywords: documentary, genocide, history, war crimes, survivors, prison, torture ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Massive student uprisings in 1960s Japan coincide with the rise of the far-left militant group, which later tortured and killed some of its members in 1972.
Plot Keywords: political, historical, revolution, radicalism, japan, violence, ideology ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: 20 years after the end of WWI, in which the nation of Tomainia was on the losing side, Adenoid Hynkel has risen to power as the ruthless dictator of the country. He believes in a pure Aryan state and the decimation of the Jews. This situation is unknown to a simple Jewish Tomainian barber who has been hospitalized since a WWI battle. Upon his release the barber, who had been suffering from memory loss about the war, is shown the new persecuted life of the Jews by many living in the Jewish ghetto, including a washerwoman named Hannah with whom he begins a relationship. The barber is ultimately spared such persecution by Commander Schultz, whom he saved in that WWI battle. The lives of all Jews in Tomainia are eventually spared with a policy shift by Hynkel himself, who is doing so for ulterior motives. But those motives include a desire for world domination, starting with the invasion of neighboring Osterlich, which may be threatened by Benzino Napaloni, the dictator of neighboring ...
Plot Keywords: political satire, comedy, world war ii, anti-war, jewish, classic film, black and white ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Gerd Wiesler is an officer with the Stasi, the East German secret police. The film begins in 1984 when Wiesler attends a play written by Georg Dreyman, who is considered by many to be the ultimate example of the loyal citizen. Wiesler has a gut feeling that Dreyman can't be as ideal as he seems, and believes surveillance is called for. The Minister of Culture agrees but only later does Wiesler learn that the Minister sees Dreyman as a rival and lusts after his partner Christa-Maria. The more time he spends listening in on them, the more he comes to care about them. The once rigid Stasi officer begins to intervene in their lives, in a positive way, protecting them whenever possible. Eventually, Wiesler's activities catch up to him and while there is no proof of wrongdoing, he finds himself in menial jobs - until the unbelievable happens.
Plot Keywords: political thriller, surveillance, espionage, moral dilemma, humanity, totalitarianism, betrayal ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Tells the story of Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman) and her unlikely but instrumental part in bringing down the fascist government that has taken control of a futuristic Great Britain. Saved from a life-and-death situation by a man in a Guy Fawkes mask who calls himself "V" (Hugo Weaving), she learns a general summary of V's past and, after a time, decides to help him bring down those who committed the atrocities that led to Britain being in the shape that it is in.
Plot Keywords: dystopian, political conspiracy, revolution, anarchism, freedom, rebellion, totalitarianism ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: High school teacher, Rainer Wenger, may be popular with the students, but he's also unorthodox. He's forced to teach autocracy for the school's project week. He's less than enthusiastic at first, but the response of the students is surprising to say the least. He forces the students to become more invested in the prospect of self rule, and soon the class project has its own power and eerily starts to resemble Germany's past. Can Wegner and his class realize what's happening before the horrors start repeating themselves?
Plot Keywords: experiment, society, psychology, dictatorship, students, teacher, collectivism ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Shin Dong-Huyk was born on November 19, 1983 as a political prisoner in a North Korean re-education camp. He was a child of two prisoners who had been married by order of the wardens. He spent his entire childhood and youth in Camp 14, in fact a death camp. He was forced to labor since he was six years old and suffered from hunger, beatings and torture, always at the mercy of the wardens. He knew nothing about the world outside the barbed-wire fences. At the age of 23, with the help of an older prisoner, he managed to escape. For months he traveled through North Korea and China and finally to South Korea, where he encountered a world completely strange to him.—Anonymous
Plot Keywords: documentary, concentration camp, human rights, survivor, interview, true story, dictatorship ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: In a futuristic world, a strict regime has eliminated war by suppressing emotions: books, art and music are strictly forbidden and feeling is a crime punishable by death. Cleric John Preston (Bale) is a top ranking government agent responsible for destroying those who resist the rules. When he misses a dose of Prozium, a mind-altering drug that hinders emotion, Preston, who has been trained to enforce the strict laws of the new regime, suddenly becomes the only person capable of overthrowing it.
Plot Keywords: dystopian, science fiction, action, drama, futuristic, totalitarianism, revolution ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: The subversive masterpieces of Russian-Ukrainian writer Isaac Babel challenged the reality of life under rising totalitarianism, and led to his arrest and execution in 1940. In Finding Babel, Andrei Malaev-Babel confronts complex traces of a turbulent history that echo in his grandfather's writing and in the conflicts of today's Ukraine and Russia. Babel's fiction is woven into Andrei's search with ethereal animation that puts the viewer, like Babel's readers, between fantasy and reality.
Plot Keywords: documentary, biography, writer, jewish, historical, soviet union, 20th century ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Lemmy Caution, an American private-eye, arrives in Alphaville, a futuristic city on another planet. His very American character is at odds with the city's ruler, an evil scientist named Von Braun, who has outlawed love and self-expression.
Plot Keywords: sci-fi, film noir, dystopian, artificial intelligence, existentialism, detective story, totalitarianism ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Miles, a nebbishy clarinet player who also runs a health food store in NYC's Greenwich Village, is cryogenically frozen, and brought back - 200 years in the future, by anti-government radicals in order to assist them in their attempt to overthrow the oppressive government. When he goes off on his own, he begins to explore this brave new world, which has Orgasmatron booths to replace sex and confessional robots.
Plot Keywords: sci-fi, comedy, dystopian, time travel, social satire, absurdist, romance ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Based on the 1951 Ray Bradbury novel of the same name. Guy Montag is a firefighter who lives in a lonely, isolated society where books have been outlawed by a government fearing an independent-thinking public. It is the duty of firefighters to burn any books on sight or said collections that have been reported by informants. People in this society including Montag's wife are drugged into compliancy and get their information from wall-length television screens. After Montag falls in love with book-hoarding Clarisse, he begins to read confiscated books. It is through this relationship that he begins to question the government's motives behind book-burning. Montag is soon found out, and he must decide whether to return to his job or run away knowing full well the consequences that he could face if captured.
Plot Keywords: sci-fi, dystopian, adaptation, books, totalitarianism, literature, freedom ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: In early-1953 Moscow, under the Great Terror's heavy cloak of state paranoia, the ever-watchful Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, collapses unexpectedly of a brain hemorrhage. Inevitably, when his body is discovered the following morning, a frenetic surge of raw panic spreads like a virus among the senior members of the Council of Ministers as they scramble to maintain order, weed out the competition, and, ultimately, take power. But in the middle of a gut-wrenching roller-coaster of incessant plotting, tireless machinations, and frail allegiances, absolutely no one is safe; not even the feared chief of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria. In the end, who will prevail after the death of Stalin?
Plot Keywords: political satire, history, black comedy, soviet union, stalin, power struggle, biography ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: In 1961, the noted German-American philosopher of Jewish origin, Hannah Arendt, gets to report on the trial of the notorious Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann. While observing the legal proceedings, Arendt concludes that Eichmann was not a monster, but an ordinary man who had thoughtlessly buried his conscience through his obedience to the Nazi regime and its ideology. Arendt's expansion of this idea, presented in her articles for 'The New Yorker', would create her concept of 'the banality of evil' that she thought even sucked in some Jewish leaders of the era into unwittingly participating in the Holocaust. The result is a bitter public controversy in which Arendt is accused of blaming the Holocaust's victims. Now that strong willed intellectual is forced to defend her ideas in a struggle that will exact a heavy personal cost.—Kenneth Chisholm (kchishol@rogers.com)
Plot Keywords: biography, history, philosophy, politics, world war ii, nazi, jewish ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Ivan Denisovich Shukhov has been sentenced to a camp in the Soviet gulag system. He was accused of becoming a spy after being captured briefly by the Germans as a prisoner of war during World War II. He is innocent, but is sentenced to ten years in a forced labor camp. The day begins with Shukhov waking up sick. For waking late, he is forced to clean the guardhouse, but this is a comparatively minor punishment. When Shukhov is finally able to leave the guardhouse, he goes to the dispensary to report his illness. It is relatively late in the morning by this time, however, so the orderly is unable to exempt any more workers and Shukhov must work. Based on the life of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Plot Keywords: war, soviet union, stalin, political persecution, survival, humanity, oppression ...
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