Topic globalisation
The Tax Free Tour
1.06K views
The Tax Free Tour travels the globe to expose the workings of offshore tax havens and the elite banking systems of the world's billionaires which operate in extreme secrecy. Using examples from multi-national corporations such as Apple Computer and Starbucks, the film traces sizeable capital streams that travel the world literally in milliseconds--all to avoid local laws and paying tax. Such routes go by resounding names like 'Cayman Special', 'Double Irish', and 'Dutch Sandwich'. The Tax Free Tour is a sobering look at how the world's rich live in an entirely different world than the rest of us...
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...
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...
The End of Poverty?
1.42K views
The End of Poverty? traces the growth of global poverty back to colonisation in the 15th century to reveal why it's not an accident or simple bad luck that there is a growing underclass around the world. Featuring interviews with a number of economists, sociologists, and historians, the film details how poverty is the clear consequence of free-market economic policy which has allowed powerful nations to exploit poorer ones for their assets, turning the money back to the hands of the concentrated few. This also follows on to how wealthy nations--especially the United States--thereby exert massive debts, seize a much disproportionate exploit of the natural world, and how this deep imbalance has dire consequences on the environment and on people...
We
2.36K views
We is a visual essay exploring the politics of empire, war, corporate globalisation, imperialism and history; using the words of Indian author and political activist Arundhati Roy, from her speech Come September given in Santa Fe, New Mexico one year after the September 11th attacks--not long after the invasion of Afghanistan. The result is a mix of archive footage illustrating specific historical events throughout South America, the Middle East and elsewhere, in context with the September 11th attacks; placed alongside the themes of empire, global economics and a short history of neo-collonialism...
Energy War
403 views
Energy War considers the continuing geopolitical consequences of the dependency on fossil fuels into the future. In the struggle for the last of the resources, countries all over the world are forced to further strategise and make strange alliances. Using the gas conflict between Georgia and Russia and the position of Saudi Arabia, Energy War travels through international markets for energy and asks: If oil and gas are scarce and expensive, where will countries turn to keep their economy going and their population warm and happy?
Surviving Progress
1.32K views
The dominant culture measures itself by the speed of "progress". But what if this so-called progress is actually driving us full force towards collapse? Surviving Progress shows how past civilisations were destroyed by "progress traps" -- alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the environment accelerates and financial elites bankrupt nations, can our globally-entwined civilisation escape a final, catastrophic progress trap?
Tales From The G20
315 views
In June 2010, leaders from the twenty largest economies met in Toronto, Canada with representatives of corporate interests to discuss the policies that shape globalisation. With exclusion zones, overlapping layers of security fencing and an estimated 25,000 police and military personnel, the city was transformed into an armed grid. Over 1.3 billion dollars were spent on security measures -- more than all previous G8 or G20 meetings combined. Tales From The G20 shows some sides of the Summit, from unmarked vans with snatch squads of plainclothes police to the pre-emptive arrest of people now facing years in prison for organising demonstrations or simply being on the street...
The Fourth World War
604 views
From the front-lines of conflicts in Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, Palestine, Korea, and the North; from Seattle to Genova and the "War on Terror" in New York, Afghanistan, and Iraq, The Fourth World War documents the stories of women and men all around the world who resist being annihilated in this war. Centred around economics and systems such as NAFTA, GATT, the G20, APEC and others, this is a war which plays along with the spread of rapacious globalisation, a feat that has pervasive consequences in the real world...
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"...
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.
The Shock Doctrine
2.18K views
By comparing the confluence of ideas about modifying behaviour using shock therapy and other sensory deprivation alongside the "shock treatment" of modifying national economics using the teachings of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economics, The Shock Doctrine presents the workings of global capitalism and details how the US, along with other western countries, has exploited natural and man-made disasters in developing countries to push through free market reforms from which they stand to benefit...
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...
Squeezed
665 views
Filmed in Thailand and the Philippines in July 2007, Squeezed tells the story of how free trade agreements and globalisation are changing the lives of millions of people living in the Asia-Pacific region with APEC. Featuring interviews with farmers, workers and slum-dwellers, the film travels across the landscapes of Asia, from the lush rice paddies of Thailand to squatter settlements perched on a rubbish dump in urban Manila. Documenting these contrasts and contradictions, Squeezed accounts the impact of globalisation...
China Blue
275 views
Shot clandestinely at a blue jeans factory in southern China where a young girl and her friends work around the clock for pennies a day, China Blue reveals what international retail companies don't want us to see: how the clothes are actually made...
The Crisis of Civilisation
604 views
The Crisis of Civilization draws on archive footage and essentially monologue by author Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed to detail how global problems like environmental collapse, financial crisis, peak energy, terrorism and food shortages are all symptoms of a single, failed global system...
The New Rulers of The World
1.42K views
The myths of globalisation have been incorporated into much of our everyday language. "Thinking globally" and "the global economy" are part of a jargon that assumes we are all part of one big global village, where national borders and national identities no longer matter. But what is globalisation? And where is this global village? In some respects you are already living in it. The clothes in your local store were probably stitched together in the factories of Asia. Much of the food in your local supermarket will have been grown in Africa...
The Corporation
3.06K views
What kind of person is the corporation? Since the current day legal status of the corporation is a person, what would happen if it sat down with a psychiatrist to discuss its behaviour and attitude towards society, culture and the environment? Explored through specific examples, this film shows how the modern day business corporation has developed into the dominant institution of our time...
Santa’s Workshop
255 views
Santa's Workshop -- Inside China's Slave Labour Toy Factories shows the long working hours, low wages, and the dangerous work and conditions inside these toy factories. Workers who protest or try to organise unions risk imprisonment, low labour costs and government protections for multinational corporations attract more and more companies to China. Figureheads blame the Chinese suppliers, but they say in the same sentence that increasing competition gives them no option. Who to believe?
Life and Debt
864 views
Life and Debt addresses the impact of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and current globalisation policies in a country such as Jamaica. By focusing on the stories of individual Jamaicans, the situation unfolds that the strategies for survival and parameters of day-to-day existence are determined by the U.S. and other foreign economic agendas...
Paradise With Side Effects
315 views
Paradise With Side Effects follows two women from Ladakh -- a remote region in the Himalayas, on a 'reality tour' of London to see what life in the west is really like. The tour exposes the real aspects of modern life: homelessness, nursing homes, massive garbage dumps, the working poor -- all in sharp contrast to the slick advertising images that colonise the world. The film provides insight into the pressures facing people all over the world as the global economy encroaches into traditional communities...
Coca Or Death
208 views
Coca Or Death delves into Bolivia -- a country torn apart by the demands of the western world for coca. This film investigates why bloody battles have broken out between farmers and armed troops on the streets of La Paz, and what the impact of privatisation is having through the country. Coca has become a symbol of national resistance in Bolivia...
Consumed — The Human Experience
330 views
Consumed -- The Human Experience explores the impacts of consumerism across the globe. The film visits consumed landscapes, looking at the personal, social and community implications of consumption along the way...
Bolivia — Not For Sale
215 views
In October 2003, an extraordinary uprising challenged the United States empire and kicked out President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada -- a representative of the United States administration and transnational corporate interests. The people are calling for new forms of representation and organisation that question the portrayed notions of democracy and traditional political parties. In February 2003, a mutiny by the police against the imposition of income taxation on the poor to fulfil IMF demands, provoked the withdrawal of tax measures; throughout 2002, peasants revolted against the US-imposed 'coca war' -- the coca-eradication plan -- that would've destroyed the only possible source of survival for thousands of people. In 2001, the people of Cochabamba fought successfully against the a most outrageous form of privatisation -- of the water supply -- forcing the government to cancel the agreement with Bethell, a US-based company...
Child Slavery
214 views
Around 8.4 million children around the world are enslaved today. Child Slavery travels across three continents, focusing on five children and their stories...
S11
168 views
S11 documents protest actions in Melbourne, Australia, 2000 against the World Economic Forum meeting. Specific accounts of police brutality and ferocious attacks on people protesting national and international issues are captured, in direct contradiction with mainstream media coverage, portraying activists as violent protesters.
Ancient Futures — Learning From Ladakh
323 views
In the Himalayas of India, Ladakh is landscape of sustainable living where traditional culture has prospered, virtually free of crime and pollution. Though as western culture colonises the area, centuries of ecological balance and social harmony are eroding. Ancient Futures reviews the dangers of western culture and prompts a challenge to re-examine what it means by "progress."
An Unfashionable Tragedy
252 views
John Pilger travels to Bangladesh to report on the horrors of the famine in the country, its causes and tragedies, circa 1975. With people passing away on the street on a daily basis from starvation and US foreign policy continually ignored, An Unfashionable Tragedy documents the plight that continues to this day, showing that food is a powerful weapon, more powerful than oil...