Julien Hequembourg Bryan (23 May 1899 in Titusville, Pennsylvania – 20 October 1974) was an American photographer, filmmaker, and documentarian who documented the daily life in Poland, Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany between 1935 and 1939, in the leadup to and early days of the Second World War.

It is stored and viewable online at the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in a digitally restored form in HD.

Afterwards he directed YMCA in Brooklyn, NY At this time Bryan started traveling abroad taking photographs, making films and writing travelogues along the way.

He funded his travels by giving slideshow lectures about countries he visited[5] and by selling his films to various companies including ERPI.

[7] Those human-interest movies chronicle travels through China, Caucasus and Georgia (1933), Soviet Union (1930 and 1935), Poland (1936), Germany (1937), Switzerland and the Netherlands (1939).

He recalled: As we drove by a small field at the edge of town we were just a few minutes too late to witness a tragic event, the most incredible of all.

[11] Through Polish Radio he also made an appeal to the American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt to help civilians targeted by enemy bombers.

He left Warsaw on September 21 after Germans declared a cease-fire to allow citizens of neutral countries to depart by train through East Prussia.

He managed to hide some of his films in souvenir gas mask containers collected by a fellow traveler from the US,[5] and by one account he hid some movies by wrapping them around his torso.

[17] In 1940 Bryan was hired by the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) to make a series of 23 educational movies on Latin American culture and customs.

Working with daily newspaper Express Wieczorny they launched a big campaign, with a page of the 1939 pictures in each issue, and the words: "Do you recognize yourself, your relatives, your house and street?

In 2003 Sam Bryan donated both his father's still and motion picture footage of wartime Europe to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

[18] Many of his works are currently held by the Library of Congress and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive[7] In 2006 Siege was named to the National Film Registry of the US by the Librarian of Congress as "a unique, horrifying record of the dreadful brutality of war".

His World War II experiences in Warsaw were fictionalized in the 1978 film ... Gdziekolwiek jesteś Panie Prezydencie (Wherever you may be, Mr. President) by Andrzej Trzos-Rastawiecki [pl].