Films about protest
1:12:45Resist — The Aftermath Of The RNC8 follows activists Rob Czernik, Garrett Fitzgerald and Luce Guillen-Givins; attorney Robert Kolstad, volunteers/arrestees from the community, and others impacted by the actions against the Republican National Convention in 2008. Taking a look back over the last year, the video shares some helpful advice for activists organising under state repression…
1:33:02Sweet Crude is the story of how large oil corporations such as Shell and Chevron have absolutely decimated the Niger Delta, but the people are fighting back. The film shows the human and environmental consequences of 50 years of oil extraction against an insurgency of people who, in the three years after the filmmakers met them as college students, became the young of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). The movement is born after series of non-violent protests, and what the corporations and colonisers don’t understand is that these people will fight for their land and emancipation until the end. Sweet Crude is their story of survival and armed resistance against corrupt governments and rapacious corporate power, amongst a complicit and collusive mainstream media.
1:44:33As one of the largest and most controversial legal cases on the planet, Crude takes a look inside the $27 billion “Amazon Chernobyl” case, viewing the real-life high stakes legal drama set against a backdrop of the environmental movement, globalisation, hackneyed celebrity ‘activism’, human rights, multinational corporate power and rapidly-disappearing indigenous cultures…
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 devastation 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…
1:28:52American Radical is a film about the life of academic Norman Finkelstein, a son of Holocaust survivors and ardent critic of Israel. Called a lunatic and self-hating Jew by some, and an inspirational figure by others, American Radical also serves to explore the issues at the centre of Palestine and Israel as Finkelstein travels around the world negotiating a voice of realism among impassioned critics and Israeli supporters. Uncompromising, even in the face of a denial of tenure at DePaul University, Finkelstein is revealed as a rare academic figure who puts the pursuit of justice above the security of his career, to expose the brutal reality of the occupation of Palestine.
48:05Unwritten Future documents the events during the Republican National Convention in 2008 where excessive use of force and questionable tactics by police are on full show. Even peaceful radio host Amy Goodman is arrested. The film is dispersed with interviews with activists, asking them what they are fighting for, contrasted with police response and the aftermath.
1:29:39By risking torture and life in jail, courageous young citizens of Burma live the essence of journalism as they document the uprisings against the military regime in 2007. Armed with small handycams, the Burma VJs stop at nothing to make their reports from the streets of Rangoon. Their video footage is smuggled out of the country and broadcast back in via satellite and offered up for use in the international media. The whole world witnesses single event clips made by the VJs, but for the very first time, the individual images have been put together here to tell a much bigger story…
31:15Ground Noise And Static is a video report on the protests that occurred in connection with the Democrat and Republican National Conventions in 2008. Corporate media would cover the platitudes and posturing of the politicians, but this film is interested in something else — a story hidden in plain sight, told from the perspective of activists…
1:19:36The Garden tells the story of South Central Farm — a 14 acre community garden and urban farm located in Los Angeles, California, which was in operation between 1994 and 2006. The entire lot is evicted and demolished against overwhelming local support for the farm and also despite the community raising an incredible amount of money to purchase the land from the owner. The owner refuses to sell and the land is demolished and still sits vacant, unused…
1:12:08Between 1970 and 1972, a group of activists used weapons to symbolically attack property, sparked by demonstrations in London against the Vietnam War. Calling themselves the Angry Brigade, the group published a series of communiqués with the actions, explaining the choice of targets and the philosophy. Targets included the embassies of repressive regimes, police stations, army barracks, boutiques, factories, government departments and the homes of Cabinet ministers, the Attorney General and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. The attacks on senior authority figures increased the desire for ‘results’ and consequently brought an avalanche of police raids. But from the start the police were faced with the difficulty of getting to grips with the section of society they found to be totally alien — were they facing an organisation, or an idea?
48:39Law Professor James Duane from the Regent Law School in Virginia Beach, Virginia; and Police Officer George Bruch from the Virginia Beach Police Department, both explain why even innocent people should never talk to the police or agree to answer questions from the police. Citing a trove of examples and even though pertaining to US law, this talk is particularly applicable for political activists the world over as Security Culture 101.
1:29:35Burning The Future documents the devastating environmental and social impacts of coal mining specifically in West Virginia in the United States, where mountaintop removal mining has obliterated 1.4 million acres of mountains, polluted the groundwater, destroyed farm land and communities. The film follows a group of people directly affected by mining who venture to challenge the coal industry with the intent to protect mountains, save their families, and preserve life. However, their efforts are hampered by the systems that protect coal interests, the interests of business and industrial civilisation. This film shows the imperative need to fight back against powerful mining magnates, and how common legal channels of persuasion and reform simply do not exist. How do we stop these massive mining magnates from killing the world we live in?
1:41:04This documentary looks at the erosion of civil liberties and increase in government surveillance since 1997 in the UK with the advent of “New Labour” and Tony Blair. Modern politicians, regardless of left or right, always seem to promise hope and change, but what is delivered is more of the same. To illustrate this, the film tracks 6 key areas that have been rapidly dismantled in so-called democracies over the last few decades: Freedom of speech; the right to assemble and protest; the presumption of innocence; the right to privacy; detention without charge, the prohibition on torture…
51:54The Invisible War documents the rapid militarisation of police in recent years by looking at the deployment of so-called ‘non-lethal’ weapons and the real effects of their use. Shotguns loaded with bean bags, rubber bullets, wood, rubber, and foam cylinders; electrical tasers; pepper sprays, OC-gas, and other chemical weapons; microwaves, stink bombs, pulsed energy weapons and many more. What is interesting is that, according to an overwhelming amount of recorded cases, these weapons have turned out to have caused many deaths and/or serious injuries, and are more often used on peaceful non-compliant citizens, or protesters, as a means of obedience rather than protection—invoking serious questions about the future of police and society.
56:24In 1929, in the face of collapsing demand for coal and a deepening economic crisis, mine owners in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, Australia; announced, with the support of government, that they would cut miners’ wages and strip them of their workers rights. When the workers refused to agree to these terms the mine owners locked the gates. 10,000 miners, pit boys and their families now found themselves without a job. What began as an dispute about industrial labour ended up overpowering a government, crippling an industry and besieging a community. This event challenged the rights of every Australian worker, and redefined the political and industrial landscape of a country that witnessed an event forever remembered as ‘The Great Australian Lockout.’
If one steps back and looks at what freedom actually means in the West today, it’s a strange and limited kind of freedom. The United States and its empire self-describe fighting the Cold War for “individual freedom,” yet it is still something that the leaders of our so-called democracies continually promise to give us. Abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the attempt to force “freedom” on to other people has led to more than just bloody mayhem, and this, in turn, has helped inspire terrorist attacks in Britain and elsewhere. In response, the government has dismantled long-standing laws that were designed to protect individual freedom and civil liberties.
1:32:33A Little Bit of So Much Truth captures a broad-based popular uprising in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca in 2006 where tens of thousands of school teachers, housewives, indigenous communities, health workers, farmers and students took 14 radio stations and one TV station into their own hands—using them to organise, mobilise, and defend the fight for social, cultural, and economic justice.
1:29:20There are plenty of anarchists in the world. Many have committed robbery or smuggling for their cause. Fewer have discussed strategies with Che Guevara or saved the skin of Eldridge Cleaver, the leader of the Black Panthers. There is only one who has done all that, and also brought to its knees the most powerful bank in the world by forging travellers cheques, without missing a single day of work bricklaying. He is Lucio Urtubia from a tiny village in Navarra in North of Spain. Lucio, 75, now lives in Paris, still doing valued political work. Lucio has been protagonist and witness to many of the historic events of the second half of the 20th century. His family was persecuted by Franco’s regime; he was on the streets of Paris for the phenomenon of May of 1968; he actively supported Castro’s revolution; and helped thousands of exiled people by providing false documents to them. But without a doubt, his greatest triumph came in the second half of the 1970s where he swindled 25 million dollars from the First National Bank—or Citibank—to later invest the money in causes he believed in.
1:08:17In Mexico, ‘maquiladoras’ is a word used to describe the sort of factories that have become commonplace with globalisation—mass assembly and manufacturing plants primarily staffed by women for low wage and long hours in unsafe and toxic conditions. Tijuana has attracted so many such factories that it has gained the nickname Maquilapolis. Delving into the landscape of this, this film asks the question: What is the human price of globalisation? Maquilapolis brings American and Mexican-American filmmakers together with Tijuana factory workers and community organisers to answer that question and tell the story of globalisation through the eyes and voices of the workers themselves. The result is a film to inform and inspire, as each day the workers confront labor violations, environmental devastation and urban chaos…
56:41One More Dead Fish reveals how destructive industrial fishing practices have decimated the Grand Banks of the North Atlantic Ocean, once an abundant area of food. The film also tells the dramatic story of how local hook-and-line fishermen are battling huge commercial fishing practices in order to survive in a globalised fishing industry. In interviews with local fishermen, government officials, biologists, and industry CEO’s, the film explores regulatory, legislative, and environmental issues. The film grounds the viewer in a clear historical context as it explains one of the world’s great environmental disasters. In examining the twisted language of the multinational fishing industry, One More Dead Fish questions why we don’t hear more about the true environmental costs of industrial fishing practices, partly the result of globalisation.
52:33Testify: Eco-Defence And The Politics Of Violence examines the forces that drive revolutionary environmental activism, using examples of direct-actions from the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) to illustrate tactics…
1:24:58Sir! NO Sir! tells the story of how—from the very start of the war, such as with the Green Berets—there was resentment within the ranks over the difference between the war in Vietnam and (as persons state in the film) the “good wars” that their fathers had fought. In the beginning some simply left the military as individuals, though over time, it became apparent that so many were opposed to the war that they could speak of a movement — which over time eventually made the military almost inoperable…
1:25:32In 1974, a young Patty Hearst became a media icon after she was kidnapped from her apartment by a group calling itself the Symbionese (taken from the word ‘symbiosis’) Liberation Army (SLA). At the time, Patty was an impressionable college student who happened to be the granddaughter of the infamous newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Hoping to spark a class war in America, for ransom, the SLA instructed the Hearsts to make a multi-million dollar donation of food to the poor. Two months later, Patty appeared to have joined forces with the SLA. As the spectacle unfolds, journalists camp outside the Hearst’s home and become consumed by the story, some even questioning the role of the media in the saga. Guerrilla serves to document some of what happened to Patty Hearst during this time, the effects of Stockholm Syndrome, how and why the SLA was formed, and what ultimately went awry.
1:27:01The Take documents the story of workers in Buenos Aires, Argentina who reclaim control of a closed auto-plant where they once worked and turn it into a worker cooperative. The factory closed as a result of the economic policies of the government under the watchful eye of the IMF. While in bankruptcy protection, the company appeared to be selling off property and inventory to pay creditors — a move which further reduced the chances of the facility returning to production. Though as the movement gains strength, having started with a garment factory several years earlier, the factory workers wade through courts and the legislative system, finally establishing their own control and winning the right to operate it themselves, as a cooperative…
1:17:28This film profiles Howard Zinn, historian, political scientist and author, who tells us the personal stories about more than thirty years of fighting for social change, from teaching through to recent protests against war. A former bombardier in World War II, Zinn emerged in the civil rights movement in the United States as a powerful voice for justice. Although a fierce critic, Zinn gives the viewer inspiration in that by learning from history and engaging politically, we can each do our part to make a difference in the world.
1:13:36Rebel Without A Pause follows renowned linguist and activist, Noam Chomsky through discussions and talks on various world events such as the invasion of Iraq, the September 11th attacks and the War on Terror. Chomsky also weaves in accounts of media manipulation, social control, and discusses the workings of the politics of fear. The film combines footage from large forums to small interactive discussions on these topics, as well as reflections from others…
1:20:48The Yes Men are a culture-jamming activist-duo from the United States that are known for their impersonations of entities that they dislike as a form of protest. Using spoofed personas, they spread awareness of problematic social issues through the mainstream media. The two have also created and maintained fake websites, which have even led to numerous interviews, conferences, and TV invitations for their spoofed personas to espouse the truth about just how corporations and governmental organisations often act in dehumanising ways toward the unwitting public. In this film, we see how the two Yes Men take on the World Trade Organisation and confront the brutal realities of globalisation using satire and tactical media to get their message across, culture-jamming the corporate interest.
1:31:20The Miami model was the name given to a set of tactics employed by police during protests in Miami, Florida relating to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) trade agreement meetings in November 2003. State Attorney Kathy Fernandez Rundle responded to allegations of police brutality by saying, “The police were very professional, very controlled… I think we have a model here for the rest of the world to emulate in the future when these sort of events take place.” This film documents these tactics from the perspective of the protesters, to show what really happened to them and to document their work opposing the FTAA, countering the mainstream media narratives of the event and the tropes espoused by those in power.
2:24:03Did you know that the legal system recognises a corporation as a person? What kind of ‘person’ is it then? What would happen if it sat down with a psychologist to discuss its behaviour and attitude towards society and the environment? Explored through specific examples, this film shows how and why the modern-day corporation has rapaciously pressed itself into the dominant institution of our time, posing big questions about what must be done if we want a equitable and sustainable world. What must we do when corporations are psychopaths?
1:30:25In the 1960s and 70s, the polarisation of the political situation in the United States was becoming acute with the Vietnam War abroad and civil rights at home being but the most obvious issues. For the youth political movement, the futile methods of peaceful protest led to the rise of an idealistic faction that undertook a more extreme approach to resistance. This faction, called the Weather Underground, attempted to team up with the Black Panthers to overthrow the US government—starting with street riots, escalating to bombing government targets. Thorough archival footage and interviews of the veterans of both sides, this film covers the movement, until changing times and disillusionment brought it to an end, alongside the FBI employing an illegal series of projects called COINTELPRO to hasten it…
49:53Fight For Country tells the story of one of Australia’s largest ever land rights and environmental campaigns, to stop the building of a second uranium mine within the World Heritage listed Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory, Australia. In 1998 the issue came to a head when Indigenous elders and activists called on people to come from around Australia and the world to blockade the construction of the mine and proposed ‘uranium deposits’, collectively called Jabiluka. The film follows activists and speaks with Aboriginal people about the impacts of the mine, following the community response and protest actions against the mines development, where over 500 people were arrested in the course of the eight-month blockade.
1:08:5030 Frames A Second is an immersive first-person account of the events that unfolded during the week the World Trade Organisation came to Seattle in the United States, November 1999. The film is assembled from the perspective of 15-year veteran network-news cameraman Rustin Thompson, who became disillusioned with mainstream media and hence covered the WTO as an independent journalist. As such, even with press credentials for the event, Thompson is swept into the retribution of the state and police power which hit at the protests with tear gas, pepper spray, and police abuse. For him and the protesters alike, it begs the question about the functioning of the so-called democracies we live in, where civil liberties and human rights are curtailed in favour of facilitating the vast corporatocracy and global economic empire—precisely one of the points that sparked protests in the first place…
1:08:51Recorded by over 100 media activists, this film tells the story of the enormous street protests in Seattle, Washington in November 1999, against the World Trade Organisation summit. Vowing to oppose—among other faults—the WTO’s power to arbitrarily overrule nations’ environmental, social and labour policies in favour of unbridled corporate greed, thousands of people from all around the United States came out in force to stop the summit. Against them was a brutal police force and a hostile media. This Is What Democracy Looks Like documents the struggle, as well as providing a narrative to the history of success and failure of modern political resistance movements.
42:53S11 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.
28:46In 1983, the Australian Government approved the construction of Olympic Dam uranium mine at Roxby Downs in central South Australia, despite overwhelming opposition by the traditional indigenous land owners—the Kokotha and Arabunna people—and other Australian’s in the community. With an approval for expansion of the mine 14 years later, this film documents one of the many events organised in protest of the mine, as well as other actions to raise awareness of the many impacts of uranium mining in Australia.
57:14After a string of popular protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organisation in 1999, tens of thousands reemerged to challenge the International Monetary Fund and World Bank at their April 2000 meeting in Washington DC. Once again, media activists were on the spot to provide the non-corporate coverage you just won’t find anywhere else. Breaking the Bank provides an informative background on the history and impact of the IMF and World Bank, and features extensive coverage of the events in Washington against the powerful organisations that are killing the planet.
1:33:36An eclectic group of activists take a stand to protect an old growth forest from logging at Warner Creek in the Willamette National Forest of Oregon. The activists block the logging road, repel State Police and intervene to stop timber sales. Over months a community builds around the blockade and similar actions spread across the region. Filmed by the activists themselves, PickAxe is the account of the direct actions from the perspective of the participants to save Warner Creek…
49:51We Are Traffic chronicles the history and development of the “Critical Mass” bicycle movement — one of the most dynamic social political movements of the apathetic 90s. In over 200 cities in 14 different countries, Critical Mass has now become a monthly ritual of reclaiming the streets by bicycle activists riding en masse…
54:40The day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) comes into effect, several thousand soldiers take over half the state of Chiapas, declaring a war against the global corporate power they say rules Mexico. They call themselves the Zapatista National Liberation Army. Zapatista shows this uprising, the story of a peasant rebellion, armed and up against the first world military. It is the story of a movement that transformed Mexican and international political culture.
23:14Interspersed with shots of direct-action and interviews with participants, Big Rattle In Seattle documents the protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organisation conference in September 1999.