An emergency room: ER debuts on this date in 1994.

 

A paralysed Czechoslovak partisan recovering from a shot in the back in an emergency ward, feverishly remembers the events that brought him to that moment. He particularly remembers Engelchen, the SS Sturmbannführer who killed his best friend and massacred the local villagers.

On the International Day of Democracy, the word “democracy” is spoken.

“Stop shooting! Stop democracy!”

– Person Nr. 1

The Gestapo arrives to liquidate the inmates of a mental hospital. Then Windisch, plainclothes Nazi, brings them a letter: there's a special commando hiding amidst the 583 patients. Interrogating them slowly pushes Windisch among them.

Characters go on a date, or fall in love*

“It would be thrilling if you were willing, and if it can never be, pity me, for you were born to be kissed, I can’t resist, you are temptation, and I am yours!”

– Nacio Herb Brown & Arthur Freed, Temptation (1933)

On a beautiful summer day in Rimini, Carlo, the handsome son from a bourgeois home, saves a little girl and becomes infatuated with the girl's mother, a young widow years his senior. Set in July 1943, the events in the outer world (poss. spoilers) and the fate of the two uneven lovers slowly come to their logical conclusion.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for July is, for unknown reasons, mostly not date-related and follows some sort of vacation narrative.

[The best] sunglasses in film for National Sunglasses Day (USA)

– Why do you always wear those dark glasses?

– A souvenir of unrequited love for my homeland.

According to IMDb, the sale of sunglasses in Poland went through the roof after this film was released and Cybulski became his country's very own James Dean.

A [favourite] soldier in film for Army Day (USA). I can not in all seriousness link to any official website in fear of throwing up, so please follow along here

“That’s how I will probably die, left like a poor old rag on the battlefield. When you know this is going to happen to you, your body suddenly becomes something terribly precious to you. This flesh, soft and warm is yours; a personal belonging not to be discarded like an awful piece of meat. You find yourself thinking about this, realizing what a wonderful thing your body is, and what an awful and wrong thing it is to maltreat it.”

Watkins takes the anonymous slaughter of the masses on the battlefield inside, into the body and mind of a young soldier.

A [favourite] movie couple for Loving Day (USA)

“Sometimes everything seems just like a dream. It's not my dream, it's somebody else's. But I have to participate in it. How do you think someone who dreams about us would feel when he wakes up. Feeling ashamed?”

– Eva

After Vargtimmen (1968), the second of Bergman's Ullmann/Von Sydow cycle. It was followed by En passion (1969).

 

Against the backdrop of war, a violinist couple tends a garden – and marriage – on the island of Fårö.

Someone makes an excuse on Sorry I Was on a Boat Day (USA)

“One thing I find appalling is when people who were [Vichy President] Pétain supporters come up to me and tell me what they did for the Resistance. Sometimes it's unreal. “Oh, Mr. Gaspard, if only you knew what we did, what I did for the Resistance.” Go ahead, pal, tell me all about it. I try to stay calm. I'm a salesman, and I want to sell my product. The company doesn't pay me to do politics and pick fights, so sometimes I find myself obliged to listen to a song and dance of some guy who shows me a drawer and gets his wife to confirm that there was indeed a revolver in that drawer during the war, a revolver which he was supposedly ready to use on the Germans. Only he never actually used it. History doesn't lie.”

– Émile Coulaudon aka Colonel Gaspard, former head of the French Resistance in Auvergne

Marcel Ophüls documents the people of Clermont-Ferrand as the microcosm of Vichy France, part of Europe's only country that happily collaborated with its occupier, Nazi Germany. What were their justifications, their excuses, their motivations? Was it survival, habit, greed? Comfort, conformity, obedience, fear?

 

And what is yours?

A non-battlefield war movie on VE Day. It had to be a Soviet film, on this date. Thank you, Russia.

“Time will pass. Towns and villages will be rebuilt. Our wounds will heal. But our fierce hatred of war will never diminish.”

– Stepan

When the cranes fly over Moscow, a young couple learns about the war. Now separated, one day, when it is over, if, they'll reunite

 

The hand-held cinematography, groundbreaking at the time, came from former war cameraman Sergey Urusevskiy.