Overlord

Overlord is the only feature film the Imperial War Museum has ever produced. Director Stuart Cooper spent thousands of hours combing through archival footage, gained access to the museum's original nitrate negatives, and incorporated real soldiers' pre D-Day diaries into the screenplay. For visual continuity, Cooper and cinematographer John Alcott sourced old German lenses from the mid 1930s to shoot the newly filmed scenes, so roughly half the film is new footage and half is genuine archival material. It won the Silver Bear Special Jury Prize at the 1975 Berlin Film Festival. Who it's for: anyone curious about the Imperial War Museum's only feature film, which visually fuses real war archive footage with fictional scenes. Who it's not for: viewers wanting a purely fictional, fast paced war film.