In its basic outline the story told in “Golden Door,” Emanuele Crialese’s beautiful dream of a film, is hardly unfamiliar. Some version of this immigrant’s tale — setting out from the old country, crossing the Atlantic in steerage, arriving at Ellis Island — is part of the family history of millions of Americans. But what makes Mr. Crialese’s telling unusual, apart from the gorgeousness of his wide-screen compositions, is that his emphasis is on departure and transition, rather than arrival.

His film takes its English title from the Emma Lazarus poem about the Statue of Liberty, but the lady in the harbor, like the rest of America (apart from Ellis Island), remains unseen as the director takes us up to the door but not through it. The Italian title, “Nuovomondo,” means “new world,” but this too is a bit misleading. It is the Old World that dominates this chronicle of Italian peasants striking out for a future they can barely imagine, and the achievement of the movie is to...

A LASTING symbol of hope has been created from the debris of death left in the World War One battlefields.

A Belgian craftsmen is using tiny pieces of lead shrapnel which still litter the killing fields of Flanders to make 10in models of brave Highland soldiers who fought and fell there in the Great War.

Wheelchair-bound Ivan Sinnaeve - known as Shrapnel Charlie - sells the detailed figures, complete with kilts and bagpipes, for £35 from Passchendaele Museum in Zonnebeke, Flanders.

And £25 from every sale is put towards the building of a Celtic Cross monument dedicated to the memory of Scotland's war dead.

Ivan's miniature army has already raised more than £5000 for the memorial, which will be unveiled at a ceremony in August likely to be attended by First Minister Alex Salmond.

The £30,000 cross commemorates more than half a million Scots who fought in the trenches - and the one in four who never came home.

When Helen Churchill Candee wrote a 42-page memoir of the Titanic's maiden voyage, she had no idea she was writing herself into the role of a Hollywood heroine.

"Titanic" director James Cameron reportedly took his inspiration for the character Rose from that manuscript, which is on public view for the first time at the Museum of Letters and Manuscripts in Paris.

But unlike the young Rose, as played by Kate Winslet, Candee was a 50-year-old American divorcee who was also a writer, nurse and suffragette, returning home in 1912 after learning that one of her sons had been injured in a car crash.

Two days into the voyage, she was enjoying the company of her fellow first class passengers before disaster struck. Candee wrote, "All of my group were gathered together in the Ritz restaurant of the ship at 11 o'clock in the evening."

Hours later, the great ship hit an iceberg.

The History Channel has picked up a fourth season of Digging For The Truth, which follows adventurers and scientists as they travel the globe searching for answers to come of civilizations greatest mysteries.

Former Navy pilot Hunter Ellis and adventurer Zay Harding will be taking over hosting duties for this season, replacing Josh Bernstein, who left the show to join the Discovery Channel, where he will serve as a producer and host on new shows for the network.

“Since launching in 2005, Digging for the Truth has become appointment viewing for our audience. After three successful seasons, we recognize the challenge to grow this series in this very competitive environment and this change in direction underscores our commitment to this dynamic franchise,” said Nancy Dubuc, Executive Vice President and General Manager of The History Channel.

Venezuela is to give the American actor Danny Glover almost $18m (£9m) to make a film about a slave uprising in Haiti, with President Hugo Chávez hoping the historical epic will sprinkle Hollywood stardust on his effort to mobilise world public opinion against imperialism and western oppression.

The Venezuelan congress said it would use the proceeds from a recent bond sale with Argentina to finance Glover's biopic of Toussaint Louverture, an iconic figure in the Caribbean who led an 18th-century revolt in Haiti.

It will also give seed money for a film version of The General in His Labyrinth, Gabriel García Márquez's novel about the last days of Simón Bolívar, who liberated much of South America from Spanish colonialism.

Glover, 60, who starred with Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon series, and more recently with Eddie Murphy in the film DreamGirls, is a civil rights activist and supporter of Mr Chávez's radical leftwing policies.

It’s taken 12 years, three authors and one rejected manuscript, but tomorrow will be another day when “Rhett Butler’s People,” the second sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind,” is published this fall.

Less a conventional sequel than a retelling from Rhett Butler’s point of view, the new book, to be published by St. Martin’s Press in November, is written by Donald McCaig, a former advertising copywriter turned Virginia sheep farmer who has written well-reviewed novels about the Civil War.

The book, at a little over 400 pages, will be a slip of a novel compared with the original, which ran more than a thousand pages. “Rhett Butler’s People” covers the period from 1843 to 1874, nearly two decades more than are chronicled in “Gone With the Wind.” Readers will learn more about Rhett Butler’s childhood on a rice plantation; his relationship with Belle Watling, the brothel madam; and his experiences as a blockade runner in Charleston, S.C.

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Fear and Misery of the Third Reich: Docudrama. By Bertolt Brecht. Directed by Susan E. Evans and Charles E. Polly. (Through Sunday, Eastenders Repertory Company at Traveling Jewish Theatre, 470 Florida St., San Francisco. Thursday through 20 at Jewish Community Center of the East Bay, 1414 Walnut St., Berkeley. Two hours, 40 minutes. Tickets $20. Call (510) 568-4118).
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An eye-opening view of how the German people allowed themselves to be taken over and stampeded into war and horrendous atrocities by Hitler and his minions emerges from Bertolt Brecht's rarely seen "Fear and Misery of the Third Reich." In a loose collection of short scenes, mostly written between 1933 and '38, Brecht chronicled the erosion of rights, mutual trust and all forms of professional integrity in the homeland he'd had to flee.

SS men intimidate through casual insinuations. Apartment dwellers are stunned to see what a careless word has done to a neighbor. A teacher trembles...

Its tagline could be "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Aztecs But Were Afraid to Ask Mel Gibson."

But writer-director Salvador Carrasco hopes that with the re-release of his movie "The Other Conquest" (La Otra Conquista) in U.S. theaters this month, comparisons or elaborate introductions won't be required. That's partly because Carrasco's much-extolled first feature film, set during the bloody encounter between the Spanish conquistadors and Aztec king Montezuma's empire, already has staked out a claim in the United States, or at least Los Angeles.

And though its story dates back nearly half a millennium, Carrasco believes his film may be more meaningful now than when it made its screen debut eight years ago. "With this kind of subject matter, the film is timeless," says the 39-year-old director, speaking by phone from his Santa Monica home. "Sort of like with good wine, it has gained through the years and become...

A film celebrating Japan's wartime ''kamikaze'' suicide pilots and written by Tokyo's nationalist governor opened in theatres on Saturday, sparking more of a pacifist than a patriotic response from audiences.

The movie comes as Japan's government edges towards a vote on revising the U.S.-drafted constitution that has strictly limited the country's military activities for six decades following its World War Two defeat.

``For Those We Love,'' written by Shintaro Ishihara, a 74-year-old writer-turned-politician, tells the true story of a restaurant owner who became a mother figure to many of the young men as they trained to crash explosives-laden aircraft into U.S. warships.

Tome Torihama's restaurant at Chiran on the southern island of Kyushu was a home from home for the trainees, mostly in their teens and early 20s, who were preparing to make the ultimate sacrifice as Japan tried desperately to avert U.S. invasion in the final months of World War Two...