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1:18:39The huge and complex problems of today often instil doubt and fear that everything is futile. Yet by analysing how the power of media, schooling and parenting have moulded us, #ReGENERATION helps us start to comprehend what we must change—both as a generation and as a culture. We see how the average family spends at least four hours a day in front of the TV. Internet and video games are not included in this figure. So guess what is shaping us? This film examines the corporate forces that deeply influence all of us, but particularly the young, providing insights into how the politics of apathy is perpetuated, and how we can turn this around into activism, if and when we are willing.
1:19:28(T)error is the story of a 62-year-old Theodore Shelby, a former Black Panther now turned informant for the FBI going under the name Saeed “Shariff” Torres. The film documents his work on an undercover sting operation that targets a Muslim American Khalifah Ali Al-Akili on weapons charges, as well as Tarik Shah, a professional jazz musician, accused of providing support to al-Qaeda, even though no actual terrorist contact ever took place. The cases are used as examples of preemptive prosecutions, and illuminate aspects of the surveillance state in the post-9/11 world of the United States.
1:39:5713th explores the intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States, as titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1865, which purported to abolish slavery throughout the United States and end involuntary servitude except as a punishment for conviction of a crime. The film contends that slavery has been perpetuated since the end of the American Civil War through criminalising behaviour and enabling police to arrest poor enslaved people and force them to work for the state under convict leasing; suppression of African Americans by disenfranchisement, lynchings and Jim Crow; politicians declaring a war on drugs that weighs more heavily on minority communities and, by the late 20th century, mass incarceration of people of colour in the United States. 13th examines the prison-industrial complex and the emerging detention-industrial complex, discussing how much money is being made by corporations from mass incarcerations.
58:32Over six desperate days in October 1929, the New York Stock Exchange crashed leading to the collapse of three thousand banks, taking people’s savings with them. In a matter of days, the United States economy was obliterated. The crash was followed by a devastating worldwide depression that lasted until the Second World War. Finances did not regain their pre-crash values until 1954. This film recounts the story of a financial disaster that we hoped could never happen again, revealing the familiar tune of cheap credit, consumerism, greed, corruption and cronyism in the current-day financial crisis…
1:24:30In March 1971, eight ordinary citizens broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania, took hundreds of secret documents out, and mailed them to newspapers across the country to share them with the public. The group, calling themselves The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, undertook the actions at a time where suspicions about systemic abuse and manipulation of social and political movements by intelligence agencies were running high in the context of the Vietnam war and 1960s counter-culture. In doing so, these citizens uncovered the FBI’s vast and illegal regimes, leading to insights about mass surveillance, intimidation, entrapment, and the use of provocateurs and informers for manipulation, and sabotage. Much of this would later go on to be known as part of a covert program called COINTELPRO that was run directly by J. Edgar Hoover to destroy social change movements—a history that is imperative to understand in the context of today, where state repression of social change movements continues.
52:2425 Million Pounds details the collapse of Barings Bank in the mid 1990s primarily by a broker called Nick Leeson, who lost £827 million ($1.3 billion) by speculating on futures contracts. The film contextualises the downfall as the history of Barings Bank was one of the oldest and most prestigious merchant banks in Britain, run by the same family for decades with extensive ties to Britain’s elites. But in the late 19th century Barings almost went bankrupt after investing heavily in South American bonds, including backing the construction of a sewer system in Buenos Aires. The bank was saved by The Bank of England, but Edward Baring, the head of the bank, was financially ruined and never recovered. This film explores the culture of Barings and of the financial markets during the 1990s, and how Nick Leeson was able to cause another huge loss of money to the bank, this time bankrupting the company. He did this by claiming fictitious profits on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange and using money requested from London as margin payments on fictitious trades to finance his loss-making positions. It’s also the profile of a stereotypical corporate psychopath, as Leeson himself explains how he was able to manipulate those around him to achieve his ends and rationalise his actions.
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…
1:39:569/11 — Beyond A Reasonable Doubt provides a summary of evidence from various sources against the official account of what happened on September 11, 2001. The film is assembled using clips from several other documentaries, news reels and archive footage to provide an example of the overwhelming evidence that contradicts statements made by official sources.
1:57:329/11 — Birth Of Treason provides an analysis of the attacks of September 11 2001. Amongst interviews and exchanges, Steven Jones and Kevin Ryan of Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice speak about their research. Examined is the phenomenon of the freefall-speed collapse of the towers and building 7, and Steven Jones’ research into Thermite/Thermate explosives…
55:599/11 — Ten Years Later takes a retrospective view of the United States to contextualise current global military and economic events. We see how the United States backed, funded and trained the Mujahideen in the 1980s at the direction of then-National-Security-Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski; and how this gives rise to Osama bin Laden and the group known as ‘al-Qaeda’ as assets of the United States military-intelligence-complex, amid the context of the Cold War. Also examined is the sprawling establishment of weapons trafficking and the “opum trade,” facilitated by the United States and Britain; along with a vast clandestine financial network funding such operations—with banks such as the BCCI at the core. We see how the events of September 11 are used as a “catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor” amongst the context of neoconservative imperialism at home and abroad, which still continues today.
1:30:569/11 Mysteries presents and analyses over 90 minutes of demolition evidence, laced with witness testimonials from key figures in the events of September 11th such as William Rodriguez — a janitor from the North Tower of the World Trade Centre who was inside during the attacks. Moving from the myth through to analysis and into a discussion of the players, careful deconstruction of the official story is set alongside clear physics. How do you turn a 110-story building to dust in under ten seconds?
1:16:489/11: I Was There presents an portrayal of the attack on New York on 11th September 2001, from the perspective of several ordinary people who chose to pick up their video cameras and descend into the chaos that was happening around them on that day. The film is a collage of their personal video diaries, that document the attacks as they unfold, and the aftermath.
1:23:49When Dolly Parton sang “9 to 5,” she was doing more than just shining a light on the fate of working women in the United States. Parton was singing the true story of the 9to5 movement that started with a group of secretaries in the early 1970s that wanted change in their workplaces. Their goals were simple: equal pay, fair work, and an end to sexual harassment. As the movement went national, it encapsulated the unique intersection of the women’s movement and the labour movement, as the women worked hard to unionise and press for real change in their workplaces. Featuring interviews with 9to5’s founders, 9to5: The Story of a Movement documents the struggle that changed workplace culture in the United States, and echos today.
26:51A Faraway Country is an examination of the Czech underground movement known as the Charter 77—an informal civic initiative in communist Czechoslovakia from 1976 to 1992, part of the Communist Soviet bloc. The film shows interviews with members of Charter 77, and others, describing first-hand the totalitarian communist regime, and their response to it.
48:38A Farm For The Future follows wildlife film maker Rebecca Hosking as she investigates how to transform her family’s farm in Devon, England, into a low energy farm with future peak energy concerns considered. With her father close to retirement, Rebecca returns to the farm to become the next generation to work the land, and the journey begins as she realises that all food production in the UK is completely dependent on cheap, abundant fossil fuel, particularly oil. After setting out to discover just how ‘secure’ the oil supply is and being alarmed by the answers, Rebecca is motivated to explore ways of farming without using fossil fuel. With the help of pioneering farmers and growers, A Farm For The Future shows that it is actually a return to nature that holds the key to farming in a low-energy future.
1:40:16A Good American chronicles the work of whistleblower William Binney, a former official of the National Security Agency who specialised in cryptography and signals intelligence analysis for over three decades. The film focuses on the lead up to the events of the 1990s where Binney was instrumental in the creation of a secret intelligence program called ThinThread, in which mass surveillance of global communications data was carried out and had sophisticated analysis applied to it in search for threats in real time. However, three weeks prior to the September 11th 2001 attacks, Michael Hayden, director of the NSA, ends the ThinThread program to instead run with another called Trailblazer which lacks privacy protections. Not long after this, Binney resigns. What the NSA does to Binney after this turn of events is the story of the transformation where Binney and his colleagues Kirk Wiebe, Ed Loomis, Thomas Drake, and Diane Roark blow the whistle on a corrupt and brutal agency.
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.
26:37A 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…
1:39:18A Thousand Cuts is a timely film about modern-day journalism and freedom of the press inside the Philippines where the political space has been usurped by social media disinformation campaigns, celebrity propaganda spectacle, and direct organised political violence. The film comes as the world awaits the verdict of the case against of Maria Ressa, the CEO and founder of the news network Rappler, who has been vocal about holding president Rodrigo Duterte accountable for his government’s much-criticised and violent “war on drugs.” In what is a salient trend of our time, A Thousand Cuts examines the disinformation campaigns and the crackdown on the media, while journalists Maria Ressa and her team place the tools of their trade—and their freedom—on the line in defence of truth and democracy.
1:16:15A World Without Water investigates the future of the world’s water supply as it currently stands and travels to Bolivia to show just one example in many of the privatisation of the water supply and the turning over of water to corporations such as Coca Cola…
59:09To its backers, Woomera detention centre played a so-called “humane yet crucial role in housing the growing numbers of ‘boat people’ landing on Australia’s shores.” To its critics, this prison, as a heavily guarded cluster of buildings ringed by red desert and razor wire, represented the “dead-heart of asylum-seeker policy” and Australia’s lacklustre regard for human rights. Woomera opened for business less than four years ago. Built for 400 people, it soon housed more than 1,400. It became notorious for riots, protests and breakouts by desperate detainees. There were reports that mental illness and self-harm were rife and as the reports mounted, TV cameras captured the protests at the perimeter fence. Certain press warned of detainees’ declining health and morale. Yet when Woomera was quietly placed in mothballs last month, its full story remained to be told…
1:35:44Above All Else is an intimate portrait of a group of activists and landowners in East Texas, United States, who undertook a series of direct actions and put their bodies in the way to stop construction of the Keystone pipeline in 2012. The film follows David Daniel, a quiet, affable carpenter, whose backyard became the epicenter of a tree-sit that physically blocked the path of the controversial pipeline. This was the birthplace of the Tar Sands Blockade, an activist group that would go on to oppose the pipeline’s construction all along its route. David’s stance against Keystone brought together an unlikely coalition of allies, from Texan farmers to student environmentalists to fire-cracker great-grandmothers like Eleanor Fairchild. Above All Else is the story of David and his allies, their struggles, and what happened when they stood in the way of the most powerful industry in the world.
44:54Abused—Battered Woman’s Syndrome and Murder is a revelatory film showing how the legal system of this culture treats women who fight back against their abusers. 19 year-old Susan Greenberg pled guilty to killing the man who systematically abused her and was sentenced to twenty-five years to life for first degree murder. After serving 18 years in prison, Greenberg was one of the first women to test a new state law that allows women convicted of murder to ask a judge for release based on evidence of Battered Woman Syndrome. This story follows her struggle and the surprising dramatic results.
1:24:45Daryl Davis is an accomplished musician, a piano player who has played all over the world with legends like Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry. He is also an activist, meeting and befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan, many of whom have never met a black person. And when some of these same people decide to leave the Klan, Daryl keeps their robes and hoods—building his collection piece by piece, story by story, person by person. In Accidental Courtesy, Daryl takes the viewer on a journey from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to Memphis, from Alabama to Ferguson, Missouri, as he recounts the entwined history of black America and popular music. Along the way, he questions several current and former Ku Klux Klan leaders as well as young Black Lives Matter activists who vehemently disagree with his tactics of tacking racism in society.
1:26:15From styrofoam cups to artificial organs, plastic is perhaps the most ubiquitous and versatile material ever invented — no product in the past 100 years has had more a profound influence and presence than synthetics. But such ‘progress’ has a cost — no ecosystem or segment of human activity has escaped the strangling grasp of plastic. Addicted To Plastic investigates what we really know—and don’t know—about this material. Talking to manufacturers, recyclers, cleaners, scientists and others, Addicted To Plastic shows plastic’s toxic legacy and devastating ecological impact, provoking serious questions about health, food and the environment…
47:19Pornography is now more easily accessible than ever before—it’s a click away on the internet. And many men are finding their everyday relationships in impacted because of their porn addiction. This documentary examines the problem and explores growing evidence that there is a chemical basis in the brain for the condition, related to dopamine, uncovering the human costs of porn addiction along the way. The film follows some real life examples of people battling their addiction, as well as reviewing some cases where addiction has unravelled with tragic results. But as with any addiction, the good news is that it can be turned around…
11:03Adrift is a short film that explores the phenomenon of space junk, where human-made objects launched into space and are now defunct orbit the Earth literally as garbage. The film makes visible some of the immediate impacts and dangers of the technological escalation of this culture, where old satellites, spent rocket stages, and other items orbit the Earth, only to collide with one another at high velocities, generating smaller fragments that collide with other items, and so on. The end point is a cascading complex of junk that engulfs the entire space around the Earth. Adrift aims to make this phenomenon visible, putting a big question mark against the claims made by many futurists and technologists that future space colonisation would even be possible, if only it were a tenable or sensible idea in the first place…
47:35Focusing directly on the world of commercial images, Advertising and the End of The World asks some basic questions about the cultural messages emanating from advertising: Do these messages deliver what they claim—happiness and satisfaction? Can we think about our collective as well as our private interests? And, can we think long-term as well as short-term?
1:00:58Ten years on from his previous film, Advertising & the End of the World, renowned media scholar Sut Jhally follows up by exploring the since-escalating devastating personal and environmental fallouts of advertising and the near-totalising commercial culture. The film tracks the emergence of the advertising industry in the early 20th century to the full-scale commercialisation of the culture today, identifying the myth running throughout all of advertising: the idea that corporate brands and consumer goods are the keys to human happiness and fulfilment. We see how this powerful narrative, backed by billions of dollars a year and propagated by clever manipulative minds, has blinded us to the catastrophic costs of ever-accelerating rates of consumption. The result is a powerful film that unpacks fundamental issues surrounding commercialism, media culture, social well-being, environmental degradation, and the dichotomy between capitalism and democracy.
1:34:33After Truth is about the growing proliferation of modern disinformation, where almost anybody with a computer and social media access can have a powerful platform without oversight, influencing the information experiences of billions of people. The melting pot is catalysed by Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, and other websites that spread disinformation to huge audiences with a profit incentive, competing to capture everyone’s attention. After Truth asks the question about where all this is heading, by exemplifying events such as Jade Helm, Seth Rich, and Pizzagate, but also profiling some major and minor personalities involved in spreading disinformation, conspiracy theories, fear, and uncertainty. With an empire in collapse, and physical reality being increasingly replaced by popular postmodern theories of “there is only subjective truth,” this film not only presents the challenge of returning to what is real, but the task of stopping disinformation from continuing to divide, confuse, distract, and destroy.
58:33Transhumanists claim a beautiful and apparently now-not-so-distant utopian future made possible by artificial intelligence, life extension and cybernetic technologies. But upon examining the convergence of these technologies and the history behind them, Age Of Transitions details how this movement of “transcending human limits” was born out of pseudo-science eugenics, and what the implications are for a world divided by the have’s and have-not’s.
54:23Agent Orange was the codename for one of the herbicides and defoliants used by the United States military as part of its chemical warfare program—Operation Ranch Hand—which ran for ten years during the Vietnam War from 1961 to 1971. During this time, the military sprayed nearly 80,000,000 litres of toxic chemical and defoliants mixed with jet fuel in Vietnam, eastern Laos and parts of Cambodia. The supposed goal being to destroy forested and rural land, depriving guerrillas of cover and to induce forced-draft-urbanisation, destroying the ability of peasants to support themselves, forcing them to flee to the cities dominated by US forces, depriving the guerrillas of their rural support base and food supply…
1:09:45More than three million Vietnamese people still suffer the gruelling effects of chemical weapons used by the United States during the Vietnam War. American militaries doused forests, lands and waterways of Vietnam with the deadly chemicals Agent Orange, White, Blue, Pink, Green and Purple. Agent Orange in particular, which contains dioxin—the most toxic chemical ever known—has disabled countless people and generations of their offspring. This film weaves personal stories together with the stories of American GIs to lead to a great unravelling of the first-hand devastating and lethal effects of Agent Orange and war, generations later.
45:25This culture runs on algorithms on a scale never before realised. Whether you get a job or a mortgage or insurance or healthcare, how you get from A to B, how huge fortunes are made or whom is driven into poverty, decisions on whom is sent to or released from prison, whom is voted for in manipulated elections—the reach of algorithms has captured so much of the major decisions of our lives, all in complete obscurity, inscrutable. So what are the implications of this? What sort of ‘decisions’ do machines make, to which we’ve come to regard as infallible and impartial, accurate and precise? Algorithms Rule Us All speaks to data scientists and programmers themselves to answer the question of what they think is unfolding with the so-called Big-Data society and how we’re continuing to hand over our lives and societies to the whim of machines that are driven by rapacious profit-driven companies, for the goal of commodification of everything. What are the implications for human autonomy, society, democracy?
1:32:33All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Legacy of I.F. Stone looks at an array of award-winning filmmakers who subscribed to I. F. Stone’s newsletter in their teens, revealing a new wave of independent, investigative, adversarial journalists following in Stone’s footsteps. Reflecting on his work during the era of McCarthyism, a chorus of independent journalists also reflect on today where giant media conglomerates are reluctant to investigate or criticise government policies—particularly on defence, security and intelligence issues. With government deception rampant, and intrusion of state surveillance into our private lives never before more egregious, independent journalists tell their story of being inspired by the iconoclastic Stone, whose fearless, independent reporting from 1953 to 1971 filled a tiny 4-page newsletter. Stone is little known today, but All Governments Lie reveals the profound influence he had on contemporary independent journalism.
1:48:34All Light, Everywhere is an arthouse film that traverses the biases of how we see things, told through the use of police body-worn cameras from the Axon corporation. As such surveillance technologies become a fixture in everyday life, the film interrogates the myth of an objective point of view, probing the biases inherent in both human perception, the lens, and the culture driving the surveillance machines—asking what it means to look and see, but also what is not viewed, and the power imbalance of whom watches whom. Through provocative vignettes, the film provides space to dismantle the perpetual insistence that if everything was recorded and processed by purportedly “neutral” sources, then both criminal activity and authoritarian malfeasance would be reduced.
1:55:53Using 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…
All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace is a series of films about how this culture itself has been colonised by the machines it has has built. The series explores and connects together some of the myriad ways in which the emergence of cybernetics—a mechanistic perspective of the natural world that particularly emerged in the 1970s along with emerging computer technologies—intersects with various historical events and visa-versa. The series variously details the interplay between the mechanistic perspective and the catastrophic consequences it has in the real world.
1:45:00In the United States, during the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, the rise of a white supremacist movement has returned, as political energy is injected into neo-confederate, neo-fascist, neo-Nazi, Klansmen, and various right-wing militia groups. More broadly, civil rights organisations such as Antifa (Anti-Fascist) and social justice groups are fighting back. Alt-Right: Age of Rage follows the development the Alt-Right, by following social justice activist Daryle Lamont Jenkins, and renowned Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer. Each movement is juxtaposed, as tensions boil over to the horrific events in Charlottesville where a young woman is killed, and 30 others injured by a self-identified neo-Nazi. Through these narratives and events, the film surveys the workings of Free Speech, deplatforming by the Left, the role of the Internet, and the consequences of fractured politics playing out in the real physical world.
58:29In a quarter of a century, the Amazon corporation has propelled Jeff Bezos from ‘online bookseller’ to technology behemoth. He is the richest man on the planet, and the company he founded is one of the most powerful in the world. This documentary investigates Amazon’s rise to corporate rein, revealing the problematic inside-operations that have the public tethered to its services. Former high-level insiders describe Amazon’s obsessive data-gathering operations, that enable the company to use what it knows about us to shape not only the future of retail, but the workplace and technology in synergy. On both sides of the world, politicians and regulators are tardily beginning to question Amazon’s power. But can the public rein in this corporate empire and break its addiction before even more damage is done to the structure of society and the environment?