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Walt Disney’s visit to the 1958 Berlinale hardly went unnoticed. The very fact that the co-founder of the Walt Disney Co. was flying to Germany made the front page of The Hollywood Reporter.

As the Cold War was heating up, the staunchly conservative Disney, then 56, made the rounds in Berlin, appearing at the Brandenburg Gate and visiting new mayor Willy Brandt, who welcomed him, saying, “Our children remind us of your characters every day.”

The still young film festival, then in its eighth year, had invited Disney because his studio’s live-action Perri was screening in its documentary lineup. Part of the True Life Adventures nature series, the film follows a female squirrel over the course of a year as she seeks a mate.

Although the series has been criticized for anthropomorphizing its animals, it was popular at the time, winning eight Academy Awards over 12 years. The 75-minute Perri was...

We're used to spy films in which the communists are the bad guys – but the eastern bloc had its own secret agent screen heroes, too

A secret agent is attending a party in an elegant apartment. Beautiful young people wear the latest fashions, sip martinis and canoodle in corners. The spy slips into a back room and starts breaking into a safe. It looks like a scene from a James Bond movie – except this is communist Hungary, and the heroes are what western policy makers in the cold war would have called "them", rather than "us". The film is Fotó Háber, an ultra-stylish spy drama made in Budapest in 1963, and, like many of the films emerging from behind what was the iron curtain, it blows apart the glum, grey image of the eastern bloc from the inside.

That we have the chance to see Fotó Háber is thanks to a...

Dana Gluckstein has photographed indigenous peoples from America to Bhutan for over 30 years. See striking images, and commentary, from her new book Dignity.

For over three decades, I have photographed indigenous peoples-groups who maintain their ancestral culture and societies-fighting for their very lives.

Related story on The Daily Beast: Gifts That Give Back

In the words of Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, "Indigenous peoples throughout the world have something profound and important to teach those of us who live in the so-called modern world...They teach us that the first law of our being is that we are set in a delicate network of interdependence with our fellow human beings."

View Our Gallery of Art Inspired by Indigenous Peoples

Dignity is also designed as a call to action. The United States is the only country that has not signed on to the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,...