1:22:22Modern 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…
46:57War is hell, but for Hollywood it has been a god-send, providing the perfect dramatic setting against which courageous heroes win the hearts and minds of the movie going public. The Pentagon recognises the power of these celluloid dreams and encourages Hollywood to create heroic myths; to rewrite history to suit its own strategy and as a recruiting tool to provide a steady flow of willing young patriots for its wars…
1:41:12Kevin Warwick is a renowned researcher in the precarious field of cybernetics, the study of ‘artificial intelligence,’ human-control functions, robotics and so-called “cybernetic organisms.” His work, as self presented here, shows how implant and electrode technology can be used to control human brain functions, to create biological brains for robots, to enable so-called “human enhancement” and treatment for neurological illnesses. The end goal is transcending human “limitations” or transhumanism, according to Warwick, which inevitably stirs up many social, ethical and practical questions. What are the implications of this work, and this world view?
1:21:49In 2006, newspapers around the United States began to publicise a unnerving phenomenon. Honeybees were a mysteriously disappearing from beehives all around the nation. Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us? investigates the multiple angles of this epidemic. It also explores the historical and contemporary relationship between bees and humans, showing alternative and inspiring beekeepers from all around the globe as they keep bees in natural and holistic ways. From Gunther Hauk in the United States to Massimo Carpinteri in Italy, each has unique philosophical and spiritual insights into their bees and are striving to keep their bees safe from pesticides, and the other causes behind colony collapse.
1:12:24In 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, director Iara Lee embarks on a journey to better understand a world increasingly embroiled in conflict. Several years later, after travelling to five continents, Lee encounters growing numbers of people who have committed their lives to change. From Iran to Burma to Palestine and Lebanon, Cultures Of Resistance explores how art and creativity can mould with the greater culture of resistance, a part of the battle for peace and justice…
1:33:45In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg shook the United States to its foundations when he leaked top-secret Pentagon documents to the New York Times that showed how five Presidents consistently lied about the Vietnam War. Consequently, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger called Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America,” who “had to be stopped at all costs.” But Ellsberg wasn’t stopped. Facing 115 years in prison on espionage and conspiracy charges, he fought back…
46:21With the recent global financial crisis, governments across the world promised decisive action — the biggest financial stimulus packages in history, along with gargantuan bail-outs of corporations and floods of money into private banks and investment firms. But what crazed logic is this: propping up bad debt with…more bad debt? Overdose reviews the happenings of the bail-outs over these years, showing how dangerous the situation continues as a burst bubble is re-inflated globally. What happens next?
24:09A young woman is raped when a one-night stand far from home goes terribly wrong. In the aftermath, as she struggles to make sense of what happened, she decides to make a film about the relationship between her own experience and the tangle of political, legal, and cultural questions that surround issues of sex and consent. Using a hidden camera, filmmaker Nancy Schwartzman goes head-to-head with the man who assaulted her, recording their conversation in an attempt to move through the trauma of her experience and achieve a better understanding of the sometimes ambiguous line between free will and coercion. The result is a powerful documentary about the terrible reality of rape and sexual violence, and the more complicated and ambivalent ways sexual assault is often framed and understood in the wider culture, examining issues too often deemed embarrassing, shameful, or taboo.
4:59This short film uses the history and figure of the Murdoch media empire as a vast invasive machine, to draw parallels to new media machines such as Google that are not only more invasive, but more pervasive than anything the Murdoch media empire has managed. Why are we not more concerned about this?
50:57Based on the comprehensive work of media scholar George Gerbner, The Mean World Syndrome takes aim at the for-profit media system that thrives on violence, stereotypes, and the cultivation of anxiety. The film takes us through how the more television people watch, the more likely they are to tend to think of the world as an intimidating and unforgiving place, while being insecure and afraid of others. We see how these media-induced fears and anxieties provide fertile ground for intolerance, extremism, and a paranoid style of politics that threatens basic social values. The result is an accessible introduction to debates about media violence and more broadly, the effects of the media system. This film is a powerful tool for helping to make sense of the increasingly intense and fractious political climate of today.
20 years on from the invention of the World Wide Web, The Virtual Revolution explores how the Internet is reshaping almost every aspect of our lives. But what is really going on behind this reshaping? The inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, believed his invention would remain an open frontier that nobody could own, and that it would take power from the few and give it to the many. So how do these utopian claims stand up to today?
58:38The Biotech Revolution is largely an exploration by scientists working in genetics and biotechnology that repeatedly promise “unprecedented health benefits and longevity for all,” amongst other things, to rationalise their work in the so-called “biotechnology revolution.” But in reality, isn’t this “revolution” simply just more of the same control imperative of science and this culture’s technology, essentially ending in the prospect of a monoculture of genetically modified people? Will such control foster into globalisation a history of inclusion and harmony? Or, will we simply end up in an extension of the current order, albeit one that is further divided, this time by genetic apartheid?
45:43Meet Roxxxy, the world’s first sex robot, and the strange men who’ve been yearning for “her” as an obedient android sex “partner.” Roxxxy’s inventor, Doug, is working on finely tuning the robot to be the perfect android sex “companion” and has a queue of men eagerly awaiting a one night stand with it to test the technology of their fantasies. But how did this come about? My Sex Robot follows the lives of three men in attempt to find out. Delosian, remembers from the age of 13 watching Bionic Woman and Six Million Dollar Man and it blew his mind. What he saw triggered his view of an ideal woman. Kaiso speaks of a similar experience sexualising mannequins from department stores. But for Edward, robot sex as already arrived. He has found it by converting his real-life girlfriend into a robot simulation. All these men speak about the power, control, predictability and obedience that sex robots bring, as opposed to relationships with real people. As a result, My Sex Robot presents a startling reality of emerging technologies with already-existing myriad sociological and psychological implications.
51:22The Future Of Biometrics takes a look at current day technologies that interface with the human body for surveillance, identification, tracking and analysis. Using fingerprints, retina scans, gate analysis and other more intrinsic physical or behavioural traits, biometric technologies provoke a range of pertinent questions around social control, privacy and mass surveillance, especially that these technologies are in use, today…
1:48:27Inside Job provides a comprehensive analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008, which at a cost over $20 trillion, caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and nearly resulted in a global financial collapse. Through interviews with key financial insiders, politicians, journalists, and academics, Inside Job traces the rise of a rogue industry which has corrupted government and academia…
1:39:39The Chicago Conspiracy reviews the legacy of the military dictatorship in Chile by sharing the story of combatant youth who were killed by the Pinochet regime as a backdrop to the history of the military dictatorship and current social conflict. The larger history is wrapped around three shorter pieces, which explore the student movement, the history of neighbourhoods that became centres of armed resistance against the dictatorship, and the story of the indigenous Mapuche…
1:36:46The War You Don’t See traces the history of ‘embedded’ and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq. As weapons and propaganda become even more sophisticated, the nature of war is developing into an ‘electronic battlefield’ in which journalists play a key role, and civilians are the victims. But who is the real enemy?
1:12:57Canada is now the biggest supplier of oil to the United States, thanks to the Alberta tar sands—a controversial billion-dollar project to extract crude oil from bitumen sands, using a very toxic process that has generated international cause for concern. Four barrels of glacier-fed spring water are used to process each barrel of oil, along with vast amounts of electricity. The waste water is dumped, filled with carcinogens and other chemicals, into leaky tailings ponds so huge that the piles can be seen from space. Downstream, people and communities are already paying the price with contaminated water supplies and clusters of rare cancers. Evidence mounts for industry and government cover-ups. In a time when wars are fought over dwindling oil and a crisis looms over access to fresh water, which will we allow to turn out to be more precious to us?
45:07On the eve of the Australian government’s release of its controversial climate change legislation, reporter Liz Jackson investigates the relentless lobbying campaign conducted over the past 12 months by both environmentalists and industry. Who has won out? Will Australia have an emissions trading scheme, as the government has promised, by 2010?
09:56Cap and Trade? Just another ponzi scheme. Annie Leonard introduces the energy traders and Wall Street financiers at the centre of this economic idea and reveals the devils in the details in current cap and trade proposals: free permits to big polluters, fake offsets. The new economic model looks much like the old, but with very clever greenwashing.
1:15:10Tapped 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…
53:06How do our families influence our relationship with our own bodies? How does popular culture’s standards of beauty get inside our hearts and heads? In what ways can sport and the drive for fitness actually make us sick rather than healthy? In Beauty Mark, former champion triathlete Diane Israel examines this culture’s unhealthy fixation on thinness, beauty, and physical perfection. She talks candidly about her own struggle with eating disorders and obsessive exercising, confronting her own past to come to terms with this culture’s unhealthy fixation on self-destructive ideals of beauty and competitiveness.
19:54A group of graduate journalism students from the University of British Columbia travel to the outskirts of Ghana as part of a global investigation tracking the shadowy industry of e-waste that’s causing big environmental problems around the world. Their guide is a 13-year-old boy named Alex. He shows them his home, a small room in a mass of shanty dwellings, and offers to take them across the dead river—which is literally dead—to a notorious area called Agbogbloshie which is one of the world’s unseen e-waste dumping grounds. Hundreds of millions of tons of waste are funnelled here each year, with more to come as the consumer boom of computers and gadgets increases across the globe—unless drastic action changes the flow of waste and addresses the terrible conditions many have to endure for the technocracy of the West.
1:43:26Filmmaker Darryl Roberts goes on a five year journey to examine this culture’s burgeoning obsession with physical beauty and perfection, showing how increasingly unattainable images contribute to the rise in low self-esteem, body dismorphia, and eating disorders for young women and girls who also happen to be the beauty industry’s largest consumers. In almost 40,000 media messages a year, young people are being told that unless you look like supermodels and rock stars, you’re not good enough for anyone. In 2004 alone, people across the United States spent $12.4 billion on cosmetic surgery. America the Beautiful explores why these people are spending so much money to cover up their discontent that is mainly driven by advertising. What are the true costs of this culture’s obsession with youth, plastic notions of beauty, and impossibly slender physiques? Who actually benefits from this high-priced journey towards a fake ideal, and does it justify an entire nation’s psychosis?
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…
1:05:44Imagine that a storm blows across your garden and that now, without your knowledge or consent, foreign and genetically-modified seeds are in your vegetable patch which you have nourished and maintained for over 50 years. A few days later, representatives of a large multi-national corporation secretly visit your home, only to return later and demand that you surrender all your vegetables and seeds. Then, they file a lawsuit against you for the illegal use of their patented and genetically-modified seeds that you never planted or used and, what’s more, the court rules in favour of the corporation. Yet, you still fight back. This is the true story of Percy Schmeiser versus Monsanto.
22:13The Guantanamo detention camp, “Gitmo”, covers forty five square miles of Cuba inside an area under a “permanent lease” to the United States. Since 2002, the base has become synonymous with its detainment of “suspected terrorists”. Although Barack Obama has given orders for the detention camp to be closed, the facilities remain open to this day. David Miller’s quiet, powerful film is the result of three days the film-maker spent touring the camps in May 2008 as part of a small group of media representatives allowed there. Although the event was presented as a chance to ‘see inside’ the working of Guantanamo, it was in fact a carefully staged PR exercise designed to yield predictable, stale and controlled media images…
1:30:13Every spring in China, 130 million migrant workers exit the cities and travel back to their home villages for the New Year’s holiday. This exodus is the world’s largest human migration, a spectacle that demonstrates the world of a rapacious acculturating industrialism against the life of a rural past. Last Train Home follows the lives of one family who have embarked on the journey of hard labour and home again for almost two decades. One story of many of the human cost of China’s ascendence as an economic superpower.
48:01Once advertised as the birthplace of a bright new future for the American Dream, Salton City, California is now crumbling into an apocalyptic landscape of pollution and desolate land. As farmers burn their fields, and the honey bee population dwindles, scum floats down the most polluted river in North America, which carries raw sewage, pesticides and factory waste from Mexico into the once-beautiful Salton Sea. Toxic Imperial Valley travels through these landscapes, meeting the squatters and other occupiers left, in what looks like the end of the world…
44:11Barbie, 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?
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.
52:18Exempt from environmental protection laws, the oil and gas industry has left idyllic landscapes and rural communities throughout the United States pockmarked with abandoned homes, polluted waterways and aquifers, as well as plenty of sick people. Split Estate zeroes in on Garfield County in Colorado, and the San Juan Basin where more demonstrations of water that can be set on fire are found, but industry isn’t just stopping there — fracking is spreading across the United States, with plans to even drill in the New York City watershed, as well as elsewhere around the globe. As the appetite for fossil fuels increases, Split Estate debunks claims by an industry that assures the public that it is a good neighbour, driving home the need to stop fracking, both here and abroad…
1:22:21Advances in technology, global demand and the very essence of the commercial fishing industry itself means that whole species of wild fish are under threat. The species of fish that we eat today are predicted to be in a state of collapse by 2050 — some are already extinct. Overfishing, or even more simply, the commercial fishing industry in general is to blame for this, along with celebrity chefs and ‘exotic’ restaurants; and mass consumer demand in today’s world of globalisation. The End Of The Line documents the concerns and the processes behind commercial fishing and it’s impact on the environment, the climate and the future existence of many species — including our own…
1:20:34Collapse is a documentary film exploring the theories, writings and life story of controversial author Michael Ruppert, a former Los Angeles police officer turned investigative reporter who has authored books on the events of the September 11 attacks, documented widespread drug trafficking and other secret operations by the CIA, and written on the issue of peak oil and other energy issues. Using archival footage interspersed as illustration, Collapse explores Ruppert’s conclusions that unsustainable energy and financial policies have led to an ongoing collapse of modern industrial civilisation…
42:15Canada’s tar sands are the largest industrial project ever undertaken—spanning the size of England. Extracting the oil and bitumen from underneath unspoiled wilderness requires a massive industrialised effort with far-reaching impacts on the land, air, water, and climate. It’s an extraordinary industrial spectacle, the true scope of which can only be understood from an aerial view. Shot primarily from a helicopter, Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands offers an unparalleled view of the world’s largest ever industrial project…
54:00Based on the immersive theatre production and experimental work by Adam Curtis, It Felt Like A Kiss is a visual exploration of the story of an enchanted world that was built by the rise of the United States as supreme power after the Second World War, and how those living in that dream world responded to this. Using extensive archive footage from throughout the 1960s, this experimental film sets out to explore the themes and consequences of how power really works in the world since the beginning of the post-world-war era, and how the perspective of the way society is organised since that time is a political product of the ideas of that time.
1:20:24Made from the same elements as stars, plants, food and human beings, dirt is very much alive and very much just as complex. One teaspoon of dirt contains a billion organisms working in balance to sustain a series of thriving communities that have become pretty much totally invisible to our daily lives. Dirt — The Movie tells the story of Earth’s most valuable and underappreciated source of fertility, from its miraculous beginning to its tragic degradation…
1:48:02Poisoned Waters investigates some of the root causes of what we see worldwide with ecological collapse, dead-zones and pollution effecting oceans, rivers and watersheds. With a focus on major waterways in the United States such as the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound, the film follows the culmination of decades of evidence that today’s systemic and growing environmental collapse comes not only from the toxic activities of industry, agriculture and massive suburban development; but also from the permeated satiety of chemicals in prolific consumer products such as face-creams, deodorants, prescription medicines and household cleaners. This is a startling reminder of the compounding threat facing our world and the need to act imperatively.
51:47Oil Rocks—otherwise known as Neft Daşları—is one of the first and largest offshore oil-platforms ever built. The location is a vast industrial city in the middle of the Caspian Sea, ordered by the Stalin regime in 1949. 60 years on, Oil Rocks is still operational and the first western film crew in its history receives access. The result is this film which documents 200 kilometers of bridges, thousands of oil workers, hundreds of platforms, up to nine-story buildings, a park and a sports field—nothing less then an oil-rig ‘Atlantis.’ By combining archive footage from the Soviet era and interviews with workers, this film tells the story of the oil fields and the extremely hard work by those involved to this day.
1:18:57Introduction To Permaculture provides an overview of some practical examples of permaculture design, while following the interwoven themes of ethics, community, planning and ecology. The film follows Geoff Lawton who is a permaculture consultant, designer and teacher in Australia and throughout the world, demonstrating some of the possibilities of permaculture design and how it can transform the way we eat and live…