Set in December, 1941, American expatriate Rick Blaine is the proprietor of an upscale nightclub and gambling den in Casablanca. "Rick's Café Américain" attracts a varied clientele: Vichy French, Italian, and German officials; refugees desperate to reach the still neutral United States; and those who prey on them. Although Rick professes to be neutral in all matters, it is later revealed he ran guns to Ethiopia during its war with Italy and fought on the Loyalist side against the fascist Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War.
Le film se déroule dans la ville d'Alep entre 2011 et 2016, pendant le soulèvement révolutionnaire, la guerre civile syrienne et le siège d'Alep. Il raconte la vie d'une jeune étudiante syrienne, Waad al-Kateab, qui filme son quotidien, depuis les premières manifestations étudiantes de 2011 jusqu'aux bombardements sur la zone assiégée à l'est de la ville.
L’hiver 1944. Une poignée d’amis se trouvent réunis dans une salle de torture. Pour avoir le droit de sortir, ils doivent gifler un prisonnier en train d’être torturé mais ils sont incapables d’un tel geste. Király le libraire et ses compagnons, donnent leur vie pour conserver une part d’humanité. Seul l’horloger Gyuricza accepte, la mort dans l’âme, d’assener les coups, dans le seul but de sauver les enfants juifs cachés dans son appartement.
The film starts with the publication of general mobilization in Serbia on July 26, 1914 in Belgrade. An artillery second lieutenant, who comes from a wealthy banking family, was assigned to the artillery battery. During the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, he was a member of the Commission, which had provided guns for the army. His family now wants to put him in the commission again. He wants to join the battery and go to war instead.
In 1970, during the Vietnam War, Special Forces Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) has gone insane and now commands his own Montagnard troops inside neutral Cambodia as a demi-god. U.S. Army Captain and special operations veteran Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) is tasked with terminating the Colonel's command with extreme prejudice.
The action starts in 1918, with the collapse of the Tomainian (German) army. A Jewish barber saves the life of a wounded pilot, Schultz, but loses his own memory through concussion.
The film begins with a voiceover describing the trench warfare situation of World War I up to 1916. In a château, General Georges Broulard (Adolphe Menjou), a member of the French General Staff, asks his subordinate, the ambitious General Mireau (George Macready), to send his division on a suicide mission to take a well-defended German position called the "Anthill." Mireau initially refuses, citing the impossibility of success and the danger to his beloved soldiers, but when Broulard mentions a potential promotion, Mireau quickly convinces himself the attack will succeed.
Juin 1941. Alors que l'offensive allemande en URSS, l'opération Barbarossa, vient de commencer, cinq amis se retrouvent dans un café à Berlin pour une dernière soirée. Le lieutenant Wilhelm Winter va partir sur le front avec son petit frère Friedhelm. Charlotte, secrètement amoureuse de Wilhelm, va également s'y rendre en tant qu'infirmière. Quant à Greta Müller, elle va rester à Berlin pour tenter de percer dans la chanson et aider son amant, Viktor Goldstein, à échapper aux persécutions antisémites. Sûrs de la victoire rapide de la Wehrmacht sur l'Armée rouge, les amis se promettent de se retrouver dans le même café à Noël pour la victoire.
In 1943 two Belarusian boys are digging in a sand field looking for abandoned rifles in order to join the Soviet partisan forces. Yustin, an old man, warns them not to dig (using sarcasm and reverse psychology). One of the boys, Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko), finds an SVT-40 rifle. The next day partisans arrive at his house and take Flyora with them, to the dismay of Flyora's mother. She fears that the loss of her son, like his father before him, will lessen her and her daughters' chances of survival.
The story is told from the viewpoint of Lt. Werner (Herbert Grönemeyer), who has been assigned as a war correspondent on the German submarine U-96 in October 1941. He meets its captain (Jürgen Prochnow), chief engineer (Klaus Wennemann), and the crew in a French nightclub. Thomsen (Otto Sander), another captain, gives a crude drunken speech to celebrate his Ritterkreuz award, in which he openly mocks not only Winston Churchill but implicitly Adolf Hitler as well.