The Birth of a Nation is a silent film from the early history of cinema that shows how moving images evolved into a powerful medium for shaping public emotion and collective historical narratives. It is often studied not just as a film, but as an early example of how cinema can construct and amplify political storytelling on a mass scale.

Metropolis is a silent science fiction film that portrays a futuristic industrial city divided between a powerful ruling class above ground and exploited workers living and laboring underground. The city itself is run like a vast machine, where human beings are reduced to functional parts within a larger system of production and control.

We introduce Metropolis because it is one of the earliest and most influential visualizations of modern industrial society as a “system.”

It helps us understand three foundational ideas that still matter today:

• Industrial control as structure: how cities and labor can be organized like machines

• Human as system component: the idea that people can be integrated into technological systems

• The origin of modern techno-imagery: many later ideas about AI, automation, and surveillance trace back to this visual language

In short, this film is not only a story about the future—it is a blueprint of how modern technological society began to imagine itself.

On World Red Cross and Red Crescent Day, this screening reflects how modern war first became visible, and how humanitarian awareness emerged alongside it. The 1916 British film The Battle of the Somme marks the beginning of seeing war—and its human cost.