The Niger Delta is still an environmental disaster after more than fifty years of oil exploitation. One and a half million tons of crude oil has been spilled into the creeks, farms and forests so far. Natural gas contained in the crude oil is burnt off in gas flares which spread toxins, acid rain and destroy crops. Poison Fire documents the life of the locals in impoverished communities, creeks full of crude oil, devastated mangrove forests, wellheads leaking gas, all working to fight against oil giant Shell to at least stop the toxic gas flares…
The 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…
Zero: An Investigation into 9/11 posits that the official narrative of the events surrounding the attacks of September 11 cannot be true. The film explores the various facets of that premise by testing scientific evidence and dramatic witness testimony against the official account to demonstrate its many shortcomings, contradictions, gaps and omissions. The question is posed that if the thesis of this film is correct, and the official narrative is false, then the entire justification for the ensuing wars of terror, rampant human rights abuses, and the curtailment of civil liberties, is built on a complex series of outrageous lies.
Between 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?
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. Good Cop, Bad Cop reveals how the Haneef case is a symptom of the deep cultural problems that beset the AFP…
Law 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.
Burning 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?
From 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…
Flow—For The Love Of Water builds a case against the growing privatisation of the world’s dwindling fresh water supply with a specific focus on human rights, pollution, the politic of corporate influence in the emergence of a domineering global water cartel. The film names and clearly documents many of the culprits, while asking the question—can anyone really ‘own’ water?
Monsanto corporation seems to be stopping at nothing: Controlling corn, wheat, soy beans, canola, mustard, okra, bringe oil, rice, cauliflower… Once they have established the norm, they aim to claim all these seeds as their intellectual property, royalties will be collected and enforced by patent law. If Monsanto controls seed, they control food and they know it. It’s strategic. It can be more devastating than bombs, it can be more powerful than guns. This is their way to control the populations of the world, and as The World According to Monsanto reveals, it’s governments in the cross-hairs also.
From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. This is by design. The Story of Stuff serves as an introduction to the underside of the current world of mass production and consumption, exposing the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues — shedding the light on the hidden processes behind our modern world. How can we create a more sustainable and just economy?
Militainment Inc. examines how news coverage of war in the United States has come to resemble Hollywood film, video games, and reality television in its portrayal of war as entertainment. Using a range of media examples—from news anchors’ idolatry of military machinery to the impact of government propaganda on war reporting—Militainment Inc. asks: How has war taken its place as a spectacle of entertainment? And how does presenting war as entertainment affect the ability of the population to evaluate the real human costs of this culture’s military-industrial-complex?
Up the Yangtze focuses on the people affected by the building of the Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze river in Hubei, China. Countless ancient villages and historic locales will be submerged, and 2 million people will lose their homes and livelihoods. The theme of the film is the rapacious transition towards consumer capitalism from a traditional farming and peasant-based society…
Loose Change is a series of films that present evidence that the September 11, 2001 attacks were planned and conducted by elements of the United States government. The series also examines anomalies in the historical record of the attacks while drawing comparisons from some of the many mysterious and infamous other events that have reshaped world history, such as the Reichstag Fire in 1933 that catapulted Hitler to dictatorship and the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964 that led to the Vietnam War…
9/11 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?
Reaching into the Orwellian memory hole, War Made Easy exposes the some 50-year pattern of government deception and media spin that has dragged the United States into one war after another from Vietnam to Iraq. Using archival footage of official distortion and exaggeration from LBJ to George Bush, this film reveals how the American news media have uncritically disseminated the pro-war messages of successive governments — paying special attention to the parallels between the Vietnam war and the war in Iraq…
What A Way To Go: Life At The End Of Empire covers the current situation facing humanity globally. It discusses issues such as peak oil, climate change, population overshoot and species extinction, as well as how this situation has developed…
Set in Latin America and the US, War on Democracy explores the historic and current relationship of Washington with countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile. John Pilger examines the role of Washington in America’s manipulation of Latin America during the last 50 years leading up to the struggle by ordinary people to free themselves from poverty and racism…
For Your Eyes Only? reports on the existence of a secret government program that intercepts millions of e-mails each day in the name of ‘terrorist surveillance’. News about the program came to light when a former AT&T employee, Mark Klein, blew the whistle on a large-scale installation of secret Internet monitoring equipment deep inside AT&T’s San Francisco office. The equipment was installed at the request of the United States government to spy on all e-mail traffic across the entire Internet. Though the government and AT&T refuse to address the issue directly, Klein backs up his charges with internal company documents and personal photos…
This 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…
Imagine a home that heats itself, that provides its own water, electricity and spaces to grow food. One that needs no expensive technology, that recycles its own waste and that can be built anywhere, by anyone, out of garbage. Literally. Thirty years ago, architect Michael Reynolds imagined such a home and then set out to build. Today, there are strong communities of people living in these homes throughout the world, but all doesn’t come without the constant resistance and hindrance from government and big business which are rightly threatened…
Taxi To The Dark Side examines America’s policy on torture and interrogation in general, specifically the CIA’s use of torture and their research into sensory deprivation. There is description of the opposition to the use of torture from its political and military opponents, as well as the defence of such methods; the attempts by Congress to uphold the standards of the Geneva Convention forbidding torture; and the popularisation of the use of torture techniques in American television shows…
60 years after the United States dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, the events are still espoused with denial and myth in histories taught by the west. White Light, Black Rain breaks this acquiescence and accounts the bombings from the point of view of the people who were there, speaking with survivors of the attacks and four American military men that were intimately involved in dropping the bombs. The film intimately details the human costs of warfare and stands as a powerful warning that with enough present-day nuclear weapons worldwide to equal 400,000 Hiroshimas, we cannot afford to forget what really happened with these events.
September 11 has indelibly altered the world in ways that people are now starting to earnestly question: not only perpetual orange alerts, barricades and body frisks at the airport, but greater government scrutiny of people’s records and electronic surveillance of their communications. The US National Security Agency (NSA) has engaged in wiretapping and the sifting of Internet communications of millions of people worldwide, including their own…
Pornography 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…
The Planet is a stylised observational video commentary that brings together an overview of the many global changes set about by industrial civilisation. Viewed through the myriad connections between consumerism and the false notion of a perpetually expanding economy on a finite planet, the film peers across the globe to reveal systemic exploitation; species extinction driven by industrial agriculture, logging, mining, manufacturing, pollution, the age of oil and plastic, etc; climate change; carrying capacity and population growth; while also positing that we—as in you and me—can do something, anything, to stop the destruction.
Around 8.4 million children around the world are enslaved today. Child Slavery travels across three continents, focusing on five children and their stories…
Robert Beckford visits Ghana to investigate the hidden costs of rice, chocolate and gold and why, 50 years after independence, a country so rich in ‘natural resources’ is one of the poorest in the world. He discovers child labourers farming cocoa instead of attending school and asks if the activities of multinationals, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have actually made the country’s problems worse…
Good Copy Bad Copy is a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture in the context of Internet, peer-to-peer file sharing and other technological advances. Featuring interviews with many people with various perspectives on copyright, including copyright lawyers, producers and artists, Good Copy Bad Copy documents that “creativity itself is on the line” and that a balance needs to be struck, or that there is a conflict, between protecting the right of those who own intellectual property and the rights of future generations to create…
What stories do contemporary music videos tell about girls, women, boys, men, sexuality and gender? What are the cultural values portrayed? And from whose perspective? Dreamworlds encourages viewers to consider how these narratives shape individual and cultural attitudes about sexuality. Illustrated with hundreds of examples, the film accounts both the continuing influence of music videos and how popular culture generally filters the identities of young men and women through a narrow and dangerous set of myths about sexuality and gender; asking viewers to re-look at the images that have been normalised and meanings taken for granted throughout popular culture…
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…
What if you live in the most destructive culture ever to exist? What if that culture refuses to change? What do you do about it? Derrick Jensen, the author of Endgame responds to these imperative questions and details how industrial civilisation and the persistent and widespread violence it requires is ultimately unsustainable—and what to do about it. Jensen weaves together history, philosophy, environmentalism, economics, literature and psychology to produce a powerful argument that demands attention…
The Intelligence Revolution is an extolling and largely non-critical account by advocate Michio Kaku who unflinchingly explains how artificial intelligence will “revolutionise homes, workplaces and lifestyles,” and how virtual worlds will apparently become “so realistic” that they will “rival” the real physical world. Robots with “human-level intelligence” may finally become a reality according to Kaku, and in the ultimate stage of scientific mastery, the era of control imperative and domination, this culture will seek to merge human minds with so-called machine intelligence. Also, for the first time, we see how a severely depressed person can be turned into a happy person at the push of a button—all thanks to the convergence of neuroscience and microtechnology. What’s wrong with such developments? And the larger culture such that technologies like this are being developed in the first place? How do such prospects impact the real physical world and the real physical lives of all of us?
Most people who know that the mainstream media manipulates stories, manufactures illusions, and exploits fears can realise that the reason is more than just bias or sloppy reporting. Behind The Big News shows the ideological agenda that originates outside the media that defines today’s headlines, using examines of some of the biggest news stories in recent decades to illustrate how this agenda is rigorously promoted and protected.
This short film chronicles a metamorphosis of mainstream media and political power throughout the last decades, by looking at the role of the television journalist. In the early 1950s, not long after the invention of television itself, TV journalists essentially served as prompters for government figureheads and official viewpoints. This function changed somewhat however, with the political scandals of the 1960s and 70s, exemplified by Watergate, where some journalists joined the mainstream shift in society of questioning political power, big business and bureaucracy. Out of this boomed a new era of investigative journalism. But this ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall as the old certainties of “good and bad” and “right and left” were blurred and no longer simple. But rather than working to make sense of the complexity, journalism turned from moral principles to a simple reporting of experience, devoid of context. TV journalists now plead with the audience to send in photos and videos as a kind of so-called “democratised” media, but what actually functions as a vast echo-chamber of uncertainty and unaccountability.
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.
Following up from The End Of Suburbia, this film examines the rich interplay on the subtle relationships between the energy crisis, neighbourhood gardens and the collapse of the ‘American dream’. Escape From Suburbia outlines potential solutions with interviews from individuals across the world who are brave enough to challenge their communities toward change…
9/11 — 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…
The average child in the United States spends 40+ hours per week consuming media—the equivalent of a full-time job. This means that by the time children born today turn 30, they will have spent an entire decade of their lives in front of a screen. Remote Control examines the implications of this unprecedented level of exposure by showing the media habits of two families and supplementing their personal insights with interviews from media experts and educators. Revealed is the centrality of media in our lives and far-reaching effects that we are only beginning to understand, as well as ways we might begin to help our children live a life instead of watching one.
What Would Jesus Buy is an examination of consumerism with a specific focus on Christmas in America. The film follows culture jamming outfit ‘Reverend Billy’ from the Church of Stop Shopping and the gospel choir which embark on a cross-country mission to “save Christmas from the Shopocalypse”. Also discussed on the way are related issues such as the role sweatshops play in America’s ‘Big-Box’ shopping culture. From the humble beginnings of preaching at his portable pulpit on New York City subways, to having a ‘congregation’ of thousands, Bill Talen (Rev. Billy) has inspired not just a ‘church’, but a national culture jamming movement…