The daring exploits of a Jewish-born secret agent who was parachuted into France during the Second World War have been celebrated at a ceremony in London.

This year’s Cannes Film Festival programme includes a long list of Jewish film-makers.

The prolific director-duo, Joel and Ethan Coen, are one of the festival’s hottest talking points with their new film Inside Llewyn Davis about a folk singer in 1960s New York.

For the last 15 years of his life, Maureen Lipman’s father Maurice struggled with short-term memory loss and the actress was “afraid it was going to happen to me”. It was the inspiration for If Memory Serves Me Right, a prime time BBC documentary broadcast on Thursday night in which she explored issues of memory and memory loss.

Steven Spielberg’s landmark Holocaust film Schindler’s List celebrates the 20th anniversary of its release next month. An adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s historical 1982 novel, Schindler’s Ark, it recounts the story of Oskar Schindler, a businessman and Nazi Party member who, by the end of the war, had saved hundreds of Jews from extermination.

A 14-year-old New York high school student sat in his classroom and watched the taped testimony of a Holocaust survivor.

In the video, the survivor recalled how he had to kill the family dog as he faced deportation to a wartime ghetto, where there would not be enough food for humans and none for animals.

George Clooney has signed a long list of celebrities — including Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray, John Goodman and Jean Dujardin — to star in his new film about heroic art scholars who retrieved stolen artefacts in the Second World War, entitled The Monuments Men.