Our good friends at Walter Presents are gifting Channel4.com viewers six international box-sets for Christmas.
Available for online bingeing from November 17, the line-up includes Burning Bush, a Czech drama chronicling the aftermath of the Prague Spring; Home Guards, which focuses on two Hungarian brothers caught up in the rise of the far-right; Frozen Sky, a German tale of social unrest, prejudice and outsider-dom set in the 1960s; The Body Collector, which tells the true story of Dutch millionaire art collector and Nazi war criminal, Pieter Menten; Flight Of The Storks, a French whodunit? that travels from Switzerland to the Congo; and The Prey, another Dutch tale of financial intrigue and wrongdoing.
Rewinding to Burning Bush, the three-parter was created for HBO by world-renowned Polish director Agnieszka Holland, and was a massive ratings-grabber at home.
"Based on actual events and characters, this drama focuses on the self-sacrifice of a student, Jan Palach, who set himself on fire in a protest against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1969," we're told. "Young female lawyer Dagmar Burešová led the legal fight brought by his family against the communist politician who slandered Palach’s name and his sacrifice for freedom.
"This emotional story of the actions of a student and the bravery of a young lawyer is, at its heart, a story of basic human values such as truth, honor, justice and courage. Their fight for freedom and moral principles, in a time of censorship and oppression, eventually led to the unification of an oppressed nation, a struggle which defeated the totalitarian regime twenty years later.
"The 20th anniversary of Palach’s death in 1969 inspired a new generation of students to start protests that led to the eventual fall of communism in Czechoslovakia, alongside the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe. The Palach family’s lawyer, Dagmar Burešová, who spent her early career defending persecuted opposition leaders, became the first Minister of Justice in a freed Czechoslovakia."
They’re all free to view by registering on Channel4.com.