Uncounted documents how the election fraud that altered the outcome of the 2004 election led to even greater fraud in 2006 and now looms as an unbridled threat to the outcome of the 2008 and future elections. The film shows how easy it is to change election outcomes and undermine election integrity across the United States using electronic voting machines and even other simple methods of manipulation...
In the wake of the attacks of September 11th 2001, the United States opened a prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The hundreds of prisoners detained there are not afforded prisoners of war status according to the Geneva Convention, they are labelled "unlawful combatants" and are held indefinitely and tortured with no right to a lawyer or a trial. Gitmo -- The New Rules Of War cuts through the official political rhetoric surrounding Guantánamo to expose what really goes on at the United States central gulag in the 'war on terror'.
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...
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...
In the age of the brand, logos are everywhere. But why do some of the world's best-known brands find themselves at the end of spray paint cans and the targets of anti-corporate campaigns? No Logo, based on the best-selling book by Canadian journalist and activist Naomi Klein, reveals the reasons behind the backlash against the increasing economic and cultural reach of multinational companies. Analysing how brands like Nike, The Gap, and Tommy Hilfiger became revered symbols worldwide, Klein argues that globalisation is a process whereby corporations discovered that profits lay not in making products (outsourced to low-wage workers in developing countries), but in creating branded identities people adopt in their lifestyles. Using hundreds of media examples, No Logo shows how the commercial takeover of public space, the restriction of 'choice', and replacement of real jobs with temporary work -- the dynamics of corporate globalisation -- impact everyone, everywhere...
Paraguay's Painful GMO Harvest reports on a nationwide peasant uprising against farmers of genetically-modified soya who are seen as colonists partly responsible for the almost total deforestation of the eastern provinces...
Outsourcing Torture documents the account of Mamdouh Habib, an Australian Muslim arrested in Afghanistan during a "general round up" where he was sent to Egypt to be tortured. Three years after his arrest, Mahdouh Habib is still imprisoned in Guantanamo, still not having been charged with any crime...
Reporters Jesper Huor and Bosse Lindquist travel to key countries where parts of the Wikileaks website operate to investigate some of the very few public faces behind the global Wikileaks network. Featuring interviews with co-founder Jullian Assange, spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson and others, WikiRebels asks: where is Wikileaks heading? Is it stronger than ever or being broken by the US or even on the inside? And who is Assange? A champion of freedom, a spy or a rapist? What are his objectives? And what are the consequences?
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?
The 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?
By examining the modern culture of industrial civilisation and the persistent widespread violence and environmental exploitation it requires, END:CIV details the resulting epidemic of poisoned landscapes and shell-shocked nations, while further delving into the history of resistance and the prospect of fighting back against such abuse. Detailed is an overview of the environmental movement analogous with the historical whitewashings of the supposedly 'pacifist' social struggles in India with Gandhi and Martin Luther King in the United States; the rise of greenwashing and the fallacy that all can be repaired by personal consumer choices. Based in part on 'Endgame,' the best-selling book by Derrick Jensen, END:CIV asks: If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the trees, poisoned the water, the air, contaminated the food supply and occupied the land by force, would you fight back?
Manufacturing Consent -- Noam Chomsky and the Media explores the political life and ideas of Noam Chomsky, the renowned American linguist and political activist. Drawing on specific examples such as the corporate media coverage of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor and the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia, Manufacturing Consent shows how the collusion of government and media running the powerful propaganda machines that manipulate the opinions of the masses, is manufacturing consent.
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.
In the name of "protecting children," the Australian Government's so-called "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.
Eat a takeaway meal, buy a pair of shoes, or read a newspaper and you're soon faced with a bewildering amount of rubbish. Over the past 30 years worldwide garbage output has exploded, doubling in the United States alone. So how did there come to be this much waste, and where does it all go? By excavating the history of rubbish handling from the 1800s -- an era of garbage-grazing urban hogs and dump-dwelling rag pickers -- to the present, with mass consumer culture, modern industrial production and the disposable American lifestyle, The Hidden Life Of Garbage documents the politics of recycling, greenwashing and the export of trash to the third world as part exposé, part social commentary...
The Cove analyses and questions Japan's dolphin hunting culture, being a call to action to halt mass dolphin kills, to change commercial fishing practices and to inform and educate the public about the risks and ever increasing hazard of mercury poisoning from dolphin meat. Told from ocean conservationist Richard O'Barry's point of view, The Cove documents a group of Taiji fishermen who engage in mass dolphin kills, which in large part, are motivated by the tremendous revenue generated for the town by selling some of the captured dolphins to aquariums and marine parks. The dolphins that are not sold into captivity are then slaughtered in the cove and the meat is sold in supermarkets...
Transhumanists 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.
The Trials of Henry Kissinger examines the evidence of war crimes by Henry Kissinger during his time as the United States "National Security Advisor" and later Secretary of State for President Nixon and President Ford. Acting in the role of the prosecution, journalist Christopher Hitchens presents solid evidence of Kissinger's complicity in a series of war crimes involving Indonesia, Bangladesh, Chile, Cyprus, East Timor and many other countries...
Neuroscientist Professor Susan Greenfield says today's developing brain is being worryingly reshaped by excessive visual stimulation -- the effect of a culture driven by screens. Biotechnology, nanotechnology, even the internet are all impacting on our brains and could be heralding future generations with different abilities, agendas and even ways of thinking. Her prediction is that we might be standing on the brink of a cataclysmic mind-makeover never before seen...
Fabled Enemies examines the US government's intelligence apparatus and its involvement in the events of September 11, 2001. Many questions surround the proceedings of that day. What were the precise actions of a shadow government operating in an underground bunker with Dick Cheney? Why did the FBI have their investigations into Bin Laden obstructed and shut down by George Bush before the attacks? Were the alledged hijackers trained at US military bases? Why was the military running exactly the same situation as 'war games' at exactly the same time of the attack?
During a town hall meeting in central Los Angeles 1996, then CIA Director John Deutch made an appearance on a panel of government representatives to refute documented allegations that the CIA had sold drugs in Los Angeles in order to finance covert operations in Central America. Questions are put forward by many people, including author and investigative journalist Michael Ruppert who explains of documented evidence of direct CIA involvement in drug trafficking, making mention of covert operations...
On December 7, 1975 with the complicity of many Western governments including the US, the UK, and Australia, Indonesia secretly invaded the small nation of East Timor. In the intervening 18 years, an estimated 200,000 East Timorese or one third of the population, had been slaughtered by the Indonesian military -- using US and British planes to bombard the island, while Western defence ministers proclaimed ignorance. As John Pilger tapes an Australian diplomat admitting that East Timor was considered "expendable", no one watching the massacre can excuse the geopolitical machinations that led to this genocide...
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...
In the 1960s and 70s, British governments conspiring with American officials, secretly tricked into leaving and then expelled, the entire population of the Chagos islands in the Indian Ocean as to make way for a major American military base. Indeed from Diego Garcia, American military planes have since bombed Afghanistan and Iraq. Stealing A Nation documents the story of the islanders who were dumped in the slums of Mauritius and in the words of the British officials who left a 'paper trail' of what the International Criminal Court now describes as 'a crime against humanity'...
The Pentagon has a long tradition of cooperation with Hollywood. Movie studios can save millions of dollars and achieve spectacular success by securing use of military stock footage, military equipment, weapons and manpower. But the catch is that Hollywood must alter scripts, whitewash history, censor and present their films to display war and the military in a favourable way. As a consequence, mainstream commercial films become the best and most powerful, widespread propaganda...
War By Other Means examines the policy of western banks making loans to so-called 'third world' countries, which are then unable to meet the crippling interest charges—debt used as a weapon. The film primarily analyses 'Structural Adjustment Programs,' which are proclaimed to enable countries to compete in the 'global economy,' but have the opposite effect of lowering wages which in turn further transfers the wealth from the poor to the rich.
Initially, the Americans claimed that they were not recording casualty figures. George Bush stated that America would do its "utmost to avoid civilian casualties". But now, details of the US Military themselves recording over 109,000 deaths have been released by Wikileaks -- over 66,000 civilian deaths; 176,000 civilians and others wounded. Iraq's Secret War Files reveals the true scale of civilian casualties, and examines evidence that after the "scandal" of Abu Ghraib, American soldiers continued to torture prisoners; and that US forces did not intervene in the torture and murder of detainees by Iraqi security services...
America's largest domestic natural gas drilling boom is in full swing and the Halliburton corporation claims it has refined a technique called 'hydraulic fracturing' that extracts natural gas in a "safe and environmentally friendly way". But upon examination, film-maker Josh Fox uncovers a trail of secrets, lies and first-hand evidence of intense water contamination and devastating environmental destruction...