New Film on Secret Meetings of World War II Will Premiere on PBS in May
The dramatic story of the secret meetings during the Second World War between Joseph Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill is sought to be told afresh in a new film, WWII Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis, and the West, which has been coproduced by KCET, Los Angeles, and the BBC. The six-hour program will be broadcast in three episodes of two hours each on PBS TV, starting on May 6, 2009.
Using documents that became available only recently from archives in Germany, Britain, the United States, Poland, and the former Soviet Union, and juxtaposing conventional documentary elements with dramatic re-creations, award-winning historian and filmmaker Laurence Rees (Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State; Nazis—A Warning from History), who wrote and directed the film, tells the unknown story of Stalin’s backroom dealings—first with the Nazis and then with Roosevelt and Churchill. The technique of combining traditional documentary features with re-creations that are based on scholarly research—authenticated by such academic advisers as Robert Dallek—enables Rees to give viewers a new understanding of war-time negotiations, through insights into the personalities of the protagonists, as those are brought out by the actors....
Read entire article at Perspectives on History (AHA mag.)
Using documents that became available only recently from archives in Germany, Britain, the United States, Poland, and the former Soviet Union, and juxtaposing conventional documentary elements with dramatic re-creations, award-winning historian and filmmaker Laurence Rees (Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State; Nazis—A Warning from History), who wrote and directed the film, tells the unknown story of Stalin’s backroom dealings—first with the Nazis and then with Roosevelt and Churchill. The technique of combining traditional documentary features with re-creations that are based on scholarly research—authenticated by such academic advisers as Robert Dallek—enables Rees to give viewers a new understanding of war-time negotiations, through insights into the personalities of the protagonists, as those are brought out by the actors....