Topic consumerism
Corporations On Trial
468 views
Corporations On Trial is a five-part series following just some of the many lawsuits being brought against multinational corporations for war crimes, conspiracy, corruption, assassinations, environmental devestation and payments to terrorists. Such serious charges have forced some of the world's largest companies to hire high-profile defence lawyers to protect public relations in cases often brought by plaintiffs who are barely literate. These five films reveal a growing anxiety about the power and influence of big business, as many multinational corporations have annual revenues greater than some countries' national budgets and indeed increasingly hold governments to ransom by their economic power. Around the world, ordinary people are fighting back and asking how many more times their interests should be sacrificed for corporate greed and shareholder profit...
Whores’ Glory
461 views
In a visual exploration of the oldest profession in the world, Whores' Glory travels the globe to show how prostitutes really live and work today by travelling across three economically divergent countries. In Bangkok, Thailand, women punch a clock and wait for clients inside a brightly lit glass box. In the red-light district of Faridpur, Bangladesh, a madam trafficker haggles over the price of a teenage girl. On the border town of Reynosa, Mexico, crack-addictions run rampant while women pray to 'Lady Death'. Whores' Glory is a unobscured look at the realities of the sex industry in the modern era...
The Electronic Storyteller
998 views
Television has colonised human storytelling--not only has creating and passing on culture been usurped by television and corporate media, today dominant culture is television and corporate media. The Electronic Storyteller outlines these changes and shows the cumulative impacts that television and mass media has on the way we think about ourselves and how we construct views of the world around us. With a focus on the stories of gender, class, and race, The Electronic Storyteller delivers an analytical framework to understand the pervasive forces behind what is at stake in the new world of saturated media and controlled imagery...
China’s Dirty Secrets
1.38K views
China's factories provide low cost products such as computers and cars to the rest of the world, but the real cost is high with heavy air pollution, contaminated waterways, decimated land, terrible working conditions, widespread cancer and incidences of deaths. China's Dirty Secrets travels across the country to follow workers at factories that assemble computers, then to e-waste dumps, and finally an industrial incinerator burning medical waste, all showing first-hand the extensive environmental impacts of explosive economic growth...
Our Daily Bread
1.67K views
Welcome to the world of industrial food production and high-tech factory farming. Set to the pace of conveyor belts, immense machines, surreal landscapes and bizarre sounds, Our Daily Bread takes an inside look at the industrial environment that mass-produces today's food. Made entirely of visuals, without commentary, this film provides a raw view of the strange realities of industrial food production, which isn't always easy to digest...
My Public Space
550 views
My Public Space is a short film following a local artist in New York City, documenting the effort to reformat the visual pollution of advertising into public artwork spaces...
The Real Mobile Phone War
600 views
As high-technology permeates further into the industrialised world, manufacturers will go to any lengths to get the raw materials to make their gadgets. Coltan from the Congo is one such rare ingredient. Few in the west know where their gadgets come from and that in the middle of Africa much human suffering is created in the pursuit of "technological advancement"...
Plastic Planet
814 views
Plastic Planet is an up close and detailed examination of one of the most ubiquitous materials of our age, the plastic age. This controversial and fascinating material has found its way into every facet of our lives, literally. Plastic Planet takes us on a journey around the world, showing that plastics are a threat for human health and the ecosystems of the planet...
The Fuck-It Point
5.46K views
People from civilisation are fast to defend it, saying that we depend on this way of life for our survival. It's an addiction. But what if civilisation is the very thing that is killing us and everything else around? How could we survive then? The Fuck-It Point is about this hidden side of civilisation, its true cost, why and how we need to take it down right now, and why most civilised people don't want to...
Blood In The Mobile
948 views
Modern society loves mobile phones -- the selection between different models and gadgets has never been bigger. But the production of this technology has a hidden, dark, bloody side. The main minerals used to produce mobile phones are coming from the mines in the Eastern DR Congo. The Western World is buying these minerals up at a furious rate, financing a bloody civil war which, during the last 15 years, has cost the lives of more than 5 million people. Blood In The Mobile explains the connections between mobile phones and the civil war in the Congo, while technology corporations whitewash the issue to "supply and demand" and claim ignorance...
Culture Jam
740 views
Pranksters and subversive artists are causing a bit of brand damage to corporate 'mind-share'. Stopping in San Francisco, New York's Times Square and other parts of the United States, Culture Jam documents some jamming in action -- armed with everything from DIY anti-ad stickers, custom neon, to the art of performance and guerilla film screenings. Culture Jam follows artists as they hijack, subvert and reclaim corporate media space in the 'war of meaning'...
The Coca Cola Case
1.10K views
Coca Cola is one of the most visible brands in the world, but there's one part of the operations the corporation doesn't want you to see. Colombia is the trade-union-murder-capital of the world. Since 2002, more than 470 workers' leaders have been brutally killed, usually by paramilitaries hired by private companies intent on crushing the unions. Amongst the top unscrupulous corporate brands is Coca Cola...
The Economics of Happiness
1.61K views
While corporations and governments continue to disseminate globalisation and the rapacious drive for consolidation of corporate power, people around the world are pushing back to reinstate local communities. Groups are coming together to rebuild human scale, local and ecological economies based on a new paradigm of localisation and sustainability. The Economics Of Happiness documents these shifts and shows how these communities have reclaimed their autonomy...
Black Gold
1.36K views
As westerners revel in designer lattes and cappuccinos, impoverished Ethiopian coffee growers still suffer the bitter taste of injustice. Black Gold follows the multi-billion dollar coffee industry down to the ground with the story of one man's fight for a fair-trade...
Tapped
994 views
Tapped shows the hidden affects of the bottled water industry by documenting the impacts to the environment from plastic bottles, pollution from production, right down to the impact on the communities, land and people from which the water is taken...
There’s No Tomorrow
1.08K views
There's No Tomorrow is a short animation that goes through the issues surrounding the collapse of industrial civilisation -- by collating the interconnectedness of resource depletion, population, energy problems and economic growth. Also examined are the many problems inherent in some proposed solutions, such as 'change-by-personal-consumer-choice' and the use of technology...
The Light Bulb Conspiracy
2.89K views
The Light Bulb Conspiracy investigates the history of Planned Obsolescence -- the deliberate shortening of product life span to guarantee consumer demand -- by charting its beginnings in the 1920s with a cartel set up expressly to limit the life span of light bulbs, right up to present-day products involving cutting edge electronics such as the iPod. The film travels to France, Germany, Spain and the US to find witnesses of a business practice which has become the basis of the modern economy, and brings back graphic pictures from Ghana where discarded electronics are piling up in huge cemeteries for electronic waste, causing intense environmental destruction and health problems...
Czech Dream
1.14K views
Two film students set out to explore the psychological and manipulative powers of consumerism by creating an extensive and pervasive advertising campaign for a fake hypermarket. The ads appear on radio, television, billboards; there is a promotional song, an internet site, ads in newspapers, magazines, and flyers with photos of fake Czech Dream products are distributed. Will people believe it and show up for the grand opening?
The Gleaners and I
646 views
The Gleaners and I explores gleaning -- the act of collecting food from farmers' leftover crops after they have been commercially harvested. Travelling along the French countryside, the film-maker follows a series of gleaners as they hunt for food, knicknacks, and personal connection; capturing the many aspects of gleaning and the many people who glean to survive -- finding not only field gleaners, but also urban gleaners and those connected to the gleaners, including a wealthy restaurant owner, an urban gleaner with a master's degree who teaches French to immigrants, and artists who incorporate recycled materials into their works...
The Toxins Return
639 views
Barbie, H&M jeans, everyday corn -- just some of the products recalled due to controls on the use of dangerous chemicals as a wave of legal cases over toxicity is calling manufacturing of certain products into question. The Toxins Return follows the trail from field worker, to customs, to the high street shopper -- how much can we trust all these products?
We Feed The World
683 views
Every day in Vienna the amount of unsold bread that is sent back and thrown away is enough to supply Austria's second-largest city, Graz. Around 350,000 hectares of agricultural land, above all in Latin America, are dedicated to the cultivation of soybeans to feed Austria’s livestock, while one quarter of the local population starves. Every European eats ten kilograms a year of artificially irrigated greenhouse vegetables from southern Spain, with water shortages as the result. We Feed The World is a film about food and globalisation, fishermen and farmers, long-distance truck drivers and high-powered corporate executives, the flow of goods and cash flow -- a film about scarcity amongst plenty.
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
41.27K views
All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace is a series about how humans have been colonised by the machines they have built -- "Although we don't realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers."
Consuming Kids
1.69K views
By examining the practices of a relentless multi-billion dollar marketing machine that now sells kids and their parents everything from junk food and violent video games to bogus educational products and the family car, Consuming Kids presents the explosive growth of child marketing in the wake of deregulation, showing how youth marketers have used the latest advances in psychology, anthropology and neuroscience to transform children into one of the most powerful and profitable consumer 'demographics' in the world...
Blind Spot
1.41K views
Blind Spot investigates the causes behind the current crisis of western civilisation by establishing the inextricable link between fossil fuels, the economy, and the effect it all has on the natural environment. By taking the inevitable energy depletion scenario known as Peak Oil to inform us that by whatever measure of greed, wishful thinking, neglect or ignorance, we are at a crossroads as a culture in which both options come with dire consequences and either way, this way of life will have to change dramatically...
The Cove
867 views
The Cove analyses and questions Japan's dolphin hunting culture, being a call to action to halt mass dolphin kills, to change commercial fishing practices and to inform and educate the public about the risks and ever increasing hazard of mercury poisoning from dolphin meat. Told from ocean conservationist Richard O'Barry's point of view, The Cove documents a group of Taiji fishermen who engage in mass dolphin kills, which in large part, are motivated by the tremendous revenue generated for the town by selling some of the captured dolphins to aquariums and marine parks. The dolphins that are not sold into captivity are then slaughtered in the cove and the meat is sold in supermarkets...
Blood Coltan
327 views
Blood Coltan travels to eastern Congo, where a bloody war is happening over a precious metal called Coltan -- a raw material used in electronic devices such as computers, televisions and mobile phones. The demand for Coltan is driven by the west, funding the war in Congo between rebel militias and children as young as ten who work the mines hunting for this precious material of the technocratic age...
END:CIV
3.25K views
By examining the modern culture of industrial civilisation and the persistent widespread violence and environmental exploitation it requires, END:CIV details the resulting epidemic of poisoned landscapes and shell-shocked nations, while further delving into the history of resistance and the prospect of fighting back against such abuse. Detailed is an overview of the environmental movement analogous with the historical whitewashings of the 'pacifist' social struggles in India with Gandhi and Martin Luther King in the United States; the rise of greenwashing and the fallacy that all can be repaired by personal consumer choices. Based in part on 'Endgame', the best-selling book by Derrick Jensen, END:CIV asks: If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the trees, poisoned the water, the air, contaminated the food supply and occupied the land by force, would you fight back?
The Hidden Life of Garbage
1.13K views
Eat a takeaway meal, buy a pair of shoes, or read a newspaper and you're soon faced with a bewildering amount of rubbish. Over the past 30 years worldwide garbage output has exploded, doubling in the United States alone. So how did there come to be this much waste, and where does it all go? By excavating the history of rubbish handling from the 1800s -- an era of garbage-grazing urban hogs and dump-dwelling rag pickers -- to the present, with mass consumer culture, modern industrial production and the disposable American lifestyle, The Hidden Life Of Garbage documents the politics of recycling, greenwashing and the export of trash to the third world as part exposé, part social commentary...