S5.E3 ∙ The Tender Trap

An angry, crackling and defiantly disordered underclass of nowheresville punk-rock kids, see their band Surgeon General's Warning (SGW) as their ticket out of small town Texas, as 1990 comes to a close.

"Lucky" Davis, a ladies-man and a devil-may-care U. S. Marine Sergeant, is leading a Marine-squadron on an expedition through a Philippine jungle where an outlaw bandit is leading a guerilla-war rebellion. Their assignment is to rescue a group of children from an island mission that has been cut off from all communication. It comes as a bit of a surprise when Davis discovers that the "children" are a group of 18-25 year-old girls blissfully bathing in a pool while awaiting rescue.

During World War II, an American serviceman in London decides to impress his English girlfriend by acting as an American gangster, which soon turns deadly.

An estimated 200,000 Chinese women were forced into prostitution by the Japanese army during WWII. Only 22 of them remain today to speak out publicly. This documentary is not a film for political gains or narrow nationalistic purposes. For the director and the crew, each and every one of those elderly women is a brave and strong individual with similar yet distinctive experiences. This is a group that deserves to be known and correctly understood by more people and a history worth being preserved in a most accurate yet sensitive way. In the documentary, the current situation of those 22 elderly women will be presented in an impersonal way. There's no interrogation, sympathy, nor exaggeration in our film. You will hear them talk about their own experiences, and you will also learn about their perspectives on life, sufferings and happiness. Now all over 80 or 90 years old, those elderly ladies are at the very last stage of their life. This is probably the last chance for the public to actually see their situations and hear their own words while they are still alive. It should not be a history just written on pages.

This film follows the first class of students at a remarkable leadership center in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a region often referred to as "the worst place in the world to be a woman." These women have been through unspeakable violence spurred on by a 20 year war driven by colonialism and greed. In the film, they band together with the three founders of this center: Dr. Denis Mukwege (2016 Nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize), radical playwright and activist Eve Ensler ("The Vagina Monolgoues") and human rights activist, Christine Schuler-Deschryver, to find a way to create meaning in their lives even when all that was meaningful to them has long been stripped away. In this ultimately uplifting film, we witness the tremendous resilience as these women transform their devastation into powerful forms of leadership for their beloved country.

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East after Japan's surrender in World War II.