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The Price of Pleasure — Pornography, Sexuality & Relationships
1.93K views
Once relegated to the margins of society, pornography is now the most pervasive and visible aspect of popular culture, assuming an unprecedented role in media as its content becomes more harsh and extreme, racist and abusive. This eye-opening and disturbing film moves beyond frivolous "liberal versus conservative" debate and tackles the real issues surrounding pornography by placing the voices of performers themselves, producers and critics directly alongside the observations of women and men as they candidly discuss the role porn has played in shaping their sexual imaginations and relationships. The Price Of Pleasure reveals a nuanced portrait of how pleasure and pain, commerce and power, freedom and responsibility have become extremely twisted by popular culture, usurping the most intimate area of our lives.
Just Do It — A Tale of Modern-Day Outlaws
517 views
Just Do It -- A Tale of Modern-Day Outlaws follows a group of activists in the UK to document their protests and actions over one year dealing with issues around climate change. Demonstrations at Copenhagen’s 2009 G20 summit and at the Drax coal power station in North Yorkshire, England, are just some of the events documented.
The Take
1.09K views
The 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...
Burma VJ
3.35K views
By 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...
Our Generation
1.60K views
All in the name of 'protecting children', the Australian Government's controversial 'Emergency Intervention' into Aboriginal communities in the remote Northern Territory, has taken away all existing Aboriginal land rights, suspended racial discrimination laws and placed over 70 communities under compulsory government control with subsequent measures of course having very little to do with 'protecting children'. Instead, the outcome has been the disempowerment of traditional land owners, the further theft of Aboriginal land, the theft of resources, with the intent being to forcibly assimilate Aboriginal culture...
Fool Me Twice
539 views
Fool Me Twice documents the Australian government's lies about the East Timor massacres, the cover-up of the Bali bombings (including the 1993 World Trade Centre attack) and subsequent anti-terror legislation forced through parliament by the Howard government. Laws that are still in effect today...
An Introduction to Your Human Rights
834 views
Do we live in a democratic society or something other than this? What does the reality of our social structure mean when consideration is given to the supremacy of property rights over human rights and freedoms? Canadian presenter Russell Porisky analyses this and explains the difference between a 'person' and a natural person, which enables the massive implications of this in a legal context...
Power, Propaganda and the Silence of Writers
1.44K views
"These days, a one-dimensional political 'culture' ensures that few writers write, or speak out, as they did in the last century. They are talented, yet safe. In the media, the more people watch, the less people know. Beneath the smokescreen of objectivity and impartiality, media establishments too often ventriloquise the official line, falling silent at the sight of unpleasant truths." Renowned independent journalist John Pilger speaks about complicity and compliance, censorship and citizen journalism as well as issues such as the holocaust in Iraq and Rudd's shrewd political apology to the Indigenous peoples of Australia...
The Coconut Revolution
2.10K views
The Coconut Revolution documents the struggle of the indigenous peoples in the Bougainville Island. The movement is described as the world's first successful eco-revolution, in that the successful uprising of the indigenous peoples of Bougainville Island against the Papua New Guinea army stopped the mining plans of the RTZ company to exploit their land for resources...
All Power to The People!
452 views
Using government documents, archive footage and direct interviews with activists and former FBI/CIA officers, All Power to the People documents the history of race relations and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States during the 1960s and 70s. Covering the history of slavery, civil-rights activists, political assassinations and exploring the methods used to divide and destroy key figures of movements by government forces, the film then contrasts into Reagan-Era events, privacy threats from new technologies and the failure of the "War on Drugs", forming a comprehensive view of the goals, aspirations and ultimate demise of the Civil Rights Movement...
Bullshit
1.35K views
Bullshit follows environmental activist Vandana Shiva as she travels around the world to in her quest to eliminate the use of genetically modified foods and seeds in her home country of India and other developing countries. Shiva argues that the “ownership of life” through the patenting of natural products, namely grains altered through genetic modification (GMOs), is not in our best interests, and is in fact harmful to agriculture in developing countries...
The Trap
21.98K views
If one steps back and looks at what freedom actually means for us today, it's a strange and limited kind of freedom. The West apparently fought the Cold War for "individual freedom", yet it is still something our leaders continually promise to give us. Abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the attempt to force "freedom" on to other people has led to bloody mayhem. This, in turn, has helped inspire terrorist attacks in Britain. In response, the government has dismantled long-standing laws that were designed to protect individual freedom...
History of Human Experimentation
1.71K views
In the early 1940s, hundreds of thousands of military personnel unknowingly became human guinea pigs in toxin experiments and biological weapon tests conducted by the U.S. government -- "Truth syrums" tested on civilians, nerve gas sprayed into suburbs, hospital patients injected with plutonium, children exposed to biological chemical agents... the list goes on and on, and in most if not all cases, tests were carried out without the knowledge or consent of those involved...
The New Rulers of The World
1.47K 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...
This Is What Democracy Looks Like
1.24K views
Shot 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 being held there. 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, protesters from all around came out in force to stop the summit. Against them is a brutal police force and a hostile media...
Taking Liberties Since 1997
969 views
Teenage sisters detained for 36 hours for a peaceful protest; an RAF war veteran arrested for wearing an anti-Bush and Blair T-shirt; an innocent man shot in a police raid; and a man is held under house arrest for two years, after being found innocent in court. Ordinary law-abiding citizens being punished for exercising their rights--right to protest, right to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, right to privacy, to be detained without charge, to be innocent until proven guilty, prohibition from torture...
Who Killed Mr Ward
821 views
The shocking story of a well respected Indigenous community leader in outback Western Australia who was locked in a metal cell in the back of a prison van and driven through the desert in the searing heat. Four hours later he was dead. Reporter Liz Jackson reveals the tragic train of events that led to this death, despite repeated warnings that Western Australia's prisoner transport system was unsafe and inhumane...
Apartheid Did Not Die
1.11K views
"Apartheid based on race is outlawed now, but the system always went far deeper than that. The cruelty and injustice were underwritten by an economic apartheid, which regarded people as no more than cheap expendable labour. It was backed by great business corporations in South Africa, Britain, the rest of Europe, and the United States and it was this apartheid based on money and profit that allowed a small minority to control most of the land, most of the industrial wealth, and most of the economic power. Today, the same system is called -- without a trace of irony -- the free market."
Good Cop, Bad Cop
599 views
The Australian Federal Police -- the glamour police force that was set-up after the Sydney Hilton Hotel Bombing in 1978 -- has enjoyed consistent showers of praise by politicians and the public ever since it's inception. However, the once-lionised AFP is now being ridiculed for bungling, excessive secrecy and collusion after the "catastrophic failings" of the "terrorism case" against Dr Mohammed Haneef. But the Haneef case is just a symptom of the "deep cultural problems that beset the AFP"...
Don’t talk to the Police
2.17K views
Law Professor James Duane and Police Officer George Bruch explain why even innocent people should never talk to the police...
About Woomera
434 views
To its backers, Woomera detention centre played a "humane yet crucial role in housing the growing numbers of boat people landing on Australia's shores". To its critics, this heavily guarded cluster of buildings, ringed by red desert and razor wire, represented the "dead heart of asylum-seeker policy"...
The Century of The Self
33.40K views
To many in both business and government, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power is truly moved into the hands of the people. Certainly the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self tells the untold and controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society. How is the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interest?
Pandora’s Box
13.18K views
Pandora's Box -- A fable from the age of science, is a six part series examining the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism, tying together communism in the Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, economy in the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, Kwame Nkrumah's leadership in Ghana during the 1950s and 1960s and the history of nuclear power.
Fight For Country
215 views
Fight 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.
Payback Time
284 views
Payback Time recounts the experiences of Ramin Bakhtiarvandi as an asylum Seeker in Australia's Detention Centres from June 2000. After his release from a 4 year long detention, Ramin receives a $227,000 bill from the government. Payback Time raises serious questions about the conduct of the Australian Government to this day when dealing with asylum seekers, as well as revealing the harsh realities of a racist culture and complicit mainstream media...
A Nod and A Wink
212 views
A Nod And A Wink reviews the use of vague Conspiracy laws in Britain from 1975, laws which are much in the same as those used in police states such as Brazil and the Soviet Union to suppress political and moral dissent. This film raises and addresses the serious questions about the way the legal system works in Britain--and indeed elsewhere...
Guilty Until Proven Innocent
168 views
Guilty Until Proven Innocent reports on the issue of innocent people confined to prisons on remand in the UK, circa 1974. People are imprisoned without trial and are later released with either a small fine or a set of conditions, or leave completely innocent. A strange set of circumstances in a country with such pretensions of a bill of rights and espoused 'legal protections'. Is bail a right or a privilege?