26:19Using interviews and frontline footage, Vietnam — The Quiet Mutiny reveals the internal sense of disillusionment and frustration born from the rift between bureaucracy and soldiers, that triggers the withdrawal of the United States military from Vietnam. As the US employs psychological warfare against the Vietnamese, reporter John Pilger finds himself unable to obtain meaningful information from the military—a press conference he attends is nicknamed “the 5 o’clock follies” for the evasive nature of the proceedings. And so it is with the grunts, the “wheels of the green machine,” that Pilger finds a very human side to the US presence in Vietnam: soldiers who were once ready to serve their country, now doubtful of their purpose there. Plied with visits from Miss America and ignored by Vice President Spiro Agnew, they experience the war in a way many of their superiors do not.
1:27:42Underground is a film about the Weather Underground Organisation—a group founded as a militant faction of the civil rights and anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The film combines interviews with members of the group after they went underground who explain how they became radicalised amongst the political happenings in the United States at the time, as well as the revolutionary struggles in Cuba, Russia and China, and the history of struggles over Native American rights and labour issues. Also detailed is the group’s analysis of American society, addressing those who have inspired them, and further explaining the reasons behind their militancy, while also introducing the issue of tactics. We see the use of property destruction as a way to bring about change and destabilise the current political order. Underground takes an intimate look at the inner workings of the Weather Underground and their strong internal collective identity, providing a record of how a bunch of middle-class Americans became self-styled militant revolutionaries, raising questions not only about the merits of their struggle, but also about past and future radical actions.
25:30Founded in 1976, the United States Office of Multilateral Diplomacy—known informally as the Zap Office—was created by Henry Kissinger to try and influence the voting patterns of third world nations at the United Nations by withholding food aid to those who did not vote alongside the United States. Zap! The Weapon Is Food is an investigation of this policy, one that makes food more powerful than oil…
49:54Heroes reports on the treatment of returning combat soldiers from Vietnam in the early 1980s. The film investigates the strange cultural absence of reverence or memory to soldiers returning home, and shows with first-hand accounts and interviews with returning soldiers, opines from the front line about America’s unpopular war.
52:11The Mexicans reports on the history of political repression and corruption in Mexico, a country dominated to this day by its close neighbour—the United States.
51:13Cambodia — Year One investigates the effect of aid to Cambodia and the extent of the country’s so-called new found stability as in 1980. The film portrays Cambodia on a brink of famine and cultural annihilation, but in the process of recovery, also showing the continued support for the Khmer Rouge regime by China and the United Nations.
1:29:38Along the way to winning an eight-hour workday and fair wages in the early 20th century, the Wobblies were one of the few unions to be racially and sexually integrated and often met with imprisonment, violence, and the privations of prolonged strikes. The Wobblies airs a provocative look at the forgotten American history of this most radical of unions, screening the unforgettable and still-fiery voices of Wobbly members — lumberjacks, migratory workers, and silk weavers — in their 70s, 80s, and 90s.
52:12As the first complete report of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge and the devastating affects of US bombing in Cambodia during the Vietnam War, Year Zero — The Silent Death Of Cambodia is an important and historic document of the grim reign of Pol Pot and the world’s response of indifference and inaction…
52:28In 1978, three years after the end of the Vietnam War, film-maker John Pilger travels back to Vietnam to find out what had happened under the new regime. Do You Remember Vietnam? recounts numerous personal stories: talks with a young tour guide at a war crimes museum who had been imprisoned in the infamous US tiger cages; a former North Vietnamese soldier into the underground base where he spent 20 years crawling through tunnels undetected; and views from the streets in Hanoi, where the largest single aerial bombardment in history took place.
45:23Controlling Interest is one of the first documentary films to provide a critical analysis on the growth of multinational corporations, and their impacts on people and the environment. Upon its release, Controlling Interest quickly became a standard audio-visual text for those concerned about the growing impact of multinational corporations, examining how the ever-increasing concentration of money and power affects employment in the United States, shapes patterns of development across the world, and influences foreign policy. This is the film that helped kick-off the anti-globalisation movement. Remarkably candid interviews with business executives provide a rare glimpse of the reasoning behind corporate global strategy, and the never-ending search for resources, ever-cheaper labour, and the commodification of life. The film documents the impact of corporate decisions on people around the world, including how “freedom” has come increasingly to mean the freedom of global corporations to operate without restriction. Some of the case studies include Massachusetts’ declining machine tool industry, Brazil’s “economic miracle,” and Chile before and after the 1973 coup.
26:27An Unjustifiable Risk investigates the many risks of plutonium usage in nuclear power generation and the use of fast-breeder reactors argued for the UK in the 1970s. The film turns to Hiroshima, Japan to illustrate the powerful destructive capacities of plutonium, feeding-back the personal experiences of those effected by nuclear weapons into the debate against nuclear power and its consequences…
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.
26:10John Pilger travels to Reno, Navada in the United States, to investigate the threats facing Pyramid Lake—a reservation of the Paiute people. With water diversion beginning in 1905 by Derby Dam and the lake’s very existence threatened, the Paiute sue the conservation department of government—the DOI—to curtail further damage. By the mid 1970s, the lake had lost 80 feet of depth, with extensive impacts to fish and other life of the lake. Further water diversion in the 1970s was driven by a racially-exclusive sportsman’s and leisure reserve used for white hunting and recreation near the town of Fallon…
25:52Street Of Joy looks at how product marketing methods and advertising techniques are applied to politics by specifically following the campaigns around the election of Jimmy Carter in the United States during 1976. In these times, the techniques of today are seen in their early years, especially the use of carefully crafted images for use on television…
50:41In Australia takes a candid look at the highs and lows of Australian society, circa 1976. The film ties together the workings of media manipulation in its early days, along with the removal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam by Governor-General coup d’état—Kerr’s Cur—to demonstrate the common apathetic side of popular culture in the ‘lucky country.’ The film also touches on the subtlety of remnant class structures remaining from English heritage by revealing the workings of the ‘Occa’—a prudish stereotype of the common person portrayed and exploited by mainstream media, revealing views on immigration and racism in a country, ironically, colonised by immigrants.
44:41The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. The experiment set out to measure the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience, in an attempt to answer the popular question at that time: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders?”
The Mayfair Set is a four part series that studies how capitalists overtly and surreptitiously came to prolifically shape governments during the 1980s, epitomised by the Thatcher government in Britain at the time. But the corporate influence of political power doesn’t simply arrive, it rather culminates after decades of engineering rooted in the economic collapse from the aftermath of the Second World War. This series focuses on the unreported and almost unseen approach that capitalists have taken since the 1940s to gradually take control of the political systems of not only the United States and Britain, but elsewhere around the world—exemplified by the boom of globalisation.
43:02Everybody who has survived adolescence knows what a scary, tumultuous, exciting time it is. But if we use memories of our experiences to guide our understanding of what today’s girls are living through, we make a serious mistake. Girls are living in a new world. Reviving Ophelia is a call from Dr. Mary Pipher, a psychologist who has worked with teenagers for more than a decade. She finds that in spite of the women’s movement, which has empowered adult women in some ways, teenage girls today are having a harder time than ever before because of higher levels of violence and sexism in the culture. The current crises of adolescence—frequent suicide attempts, dropping out of school and running away from home, teenage pregnancies in unprecedented numbers, and an epidemic of eating disorders—are caused not so much by “dysfunctional families” or incorrect messages from parents as by our media-saturated, image-obsessed culture.
51:58Globalisation has gone to great lengths to coerce many countries around the world to open ‘free trade zones’ for Western markets, where businesses receive special tax benefits and other rewards for operating factories and exploiting cheap labour. The argument, as is always cited, is for growth of the global economy. Free Trade Slaves sets out to examine these ideas by looking at the realities of such practice. Told from the perspective of the workers in Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Mexico and Morocco; the film exposes systemic human rights abuses, harrowing environmental destruction, birth defects and other long lasting health problems and social issues. The filmmakers suggest that workers around the world need to assert the right to unionise and organise together to demand and retain decent conditions, and that consumers should do their part by boycotting companies that continue to abuse people and the environment.
The Life of Birds follows the evolution and habits of bird species all across the globe, showing how a huge variety of birds each deal with a different aspect of life.
51:13Apartheid 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.
1:28:37An Act of Conscience documents the story of two couples Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner who refused to pay income tax throughout the 1980s in an act of defiance against military spending and war. The film captures the support community that formed in response to the seizure of their home by the IRS, and the conflict with the young couple with a newborn who bought the home at a government auction. Was this an effective protest?
51:50The Way of All Flesh traces the story of Henriettta Lacks as she dies of cancer in 1951. Before she died cells were removed from her body and cultivated in a laboratory by scientists in the hope that they could find a cure for cancer. The cells known as the HeLa line have been growing ever since, and the scientists found that they were growing in ways they could not control. The cells transformed modern medicine, the Polio vaccine, but they also became caught up in the politics of our age, shaping the policies of countries and of presidents, and even becoming involved in the cold war, as scientists were convinced that in her cells lay the secret in how to conquer death.
25:12Through exploring deep questions about the way mainstream media is organised and perpetuated in concert with technological development, media expert George Gerbner delivers a solid indictment of the way the so-called “information superhighway” is now being constructed. Following on from his solid work looking at the impacts of television on society, Gerbner turns to examining emerging technologies like V-chip and the way they interface with globalisation. This film urges the viewer to struggle for democratic principles in this emerging technoculture.
1:07:43This experimental film recounts the histories of plane hijackings and bombings throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s, and pits them against the media reporting of such events and the real-politick of the time to show the interplay between terrorism, political narratives and control of society. We see how aspects of the interplay have changed over time, and how the media culture has turned acts of terror into apolitical carnage-seeking voyeurism. Also presented by taking this view, is a commentary on how this culture has a hyperactive focus on terrorism while other much more deathly tragedies are ignored merely because they are mundane and non-threatening to political power. For example, more people die painful deaths every year by slipping in bathtubs than by any terrorist attack. This reveals the priorities of those in power, with the cultural focus on fearmomgering as a means for social control, and a disillusionment of the public in the age of decline.
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?
51:32The Daily Mirror used to be a peoples’ paper that respected its readers and earned trust and affection. But that changed out of all recognition when the British public were told that the new information technology, heralded by The Sun’s move to Wapping, would bring a greater variety of newspapers and a more diverse media. Instead, what happened was rapid moves toward contracted press controlled by ever fewer proprietors. John Pilger describes the downfall of his old paper and the all-pervasive influence of Rupert Murdoch…
31:41Television has colonised human storytelling—not only has creating and passing on culture been usurped by television and corporate media, today dominant culture is television and corporate media. The Electronic Storyteller outlines these changes and shows the cumulative impacts that television and mass media has on the way we think about ourselves and how we construct views of the world around us. With a focus on the stories of gender, class, and race, The Electronic Storyteller delivers an analytical framework to understand the pervasive forces behind what is at stake in the new world of saturated media and controlled imagery…
1:33:51The insane and horrific history of the development of nuclear weapons is examined first-hand in Trinity and Beyond. The film makes use of extensive archive footage from declassified military sources, where the sources themselves speak about the development of nuclear weapons, revealing the calamitous results of use. From the United States’s Trinity test of 1945, to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; to the rapid increase in testing and proliferation by states across the globe, culminating to the first Chinese atomic bomb test in 1964, Trinity and Beyond is a stark reminder of this culture’s insanity and death urge, and how—unless it is stopped—the expanding threat it continues to pose draws in, literally, the prospect of life on this planet for generations to come.
44:27From its origins as the Office of Strategic Services in the 1950s until present as the CIA, president Harry Truman’s creation has been the object of mystery, thrills and fear to people all over the world with even the White House fearing the agency. With resources to assassinate political leaders, overthrow governments and start wars, Secrets Of The CIA documents these operations of the CIA from the perspective of ex-agents as they speak about their experiences working for the CIA, tell of what they were required to do in places like South America, Europe and in the United States, and how they enjoyed the work…
59:38Produced twenty years ago, and even several years before the rise of Fox News, The Myth of the Liberal Media is possibly relevant now more than ever. The film dissects how news content gets shaped within a narrow and ultimately conservative institutional framework that marginalises other perspectives, filtering news events through a lens that serves power. Featuring scholarly analysis from Justin Lewis, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, The Myth of the Liberal Media asks: If you want to understand the way a system works, you look at its institutional structure. How it is organised, how it is controlled, how it is funded. The documentary examines the relationship advertising has in funding the media, and how this sets agendas, as well as exploring certain narratives that are propagated through a number of case studies that reveal how these mechanisms ultimately serve power instead of public interest.
49:51We Are Traffic chronicles the history and development of the “Critical Mass” bicycle movement — one of the most dynamic social political movements of the apathetic 90s. In over 200 cities in 14 different countries, Critical Mass has now become a monthly ritual of reclaiming the streets by bicycle activists riding en masse…
53:53Tough Guise — Violence, Media and the Crisis in Masculinity examines the relationship between the images pervasive in popular culture, and the construction of so-called masculine identities from them.
1:27:14During a ten-hour period in January 1995, Annabel Chong had sex with 251 men in front of cameras. The event was a world record and the resulting video sold more than 40,000 copies, starting a trend of record-breaking gang-bang pornography. Chong states that she intended for this act to “challenge the notion of women as passive sex objects,” and added, “I wanted to take on the role of the stud. The more [partners], the better.” Sex: The Annabel Chong Story revisits the story of that day and connects it to Chong’s life as a student and as the daughter of a middle-class Chinese couple in Singapore. She talks about her decisions, and the film also follows her to an AIDS test after the world-record-setting recording where she also self-harmed and was never paid the $10,000 she was promised. The film closes on route home to Singapore, where Chong visits her parents who do not know about her dealings with the porn world, while friends and professors do. Should she tell her mother?
45:30In the early 1940s, hundreds of thousands of people unknowingly became test subjects in toxins experiments and biological weapons tests conducted by the United States government. LSD tested on civilians, nerve gas sprayed into suburbs, hospital patients injected with plutonium, children exposed to biological and chemical agents just to see what would happen…the list goes on. And in most if not all cases, tests were carried out without the knowledge or consent of those involved. In 1996, evidence of these secret operations hit the news, uncovering a history of secret operations and covert projects that cast a large shadow over the operations of US military and intelligence agencies, to this day. Experiments with biological weapons and the testing of chemical warfare were only part of the story…
54:40The day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) comes into effect, several thousand soldiers take over half the state of Chiapas, declaring a war against the global corporate power they say rules Mexico. They call themselves the Zapatista National Liberation Army. Zapatista shows this uprising, the story of a peasant rebellion, armed and up against the first world military. It is the story of a movement that transformed Mexican and international political culture.
23:14Interspersed with shots of direct-action and interviews with participants, Big Rattle In Seattle documents the protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organisation conference in September 1999.
49:30The 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney were universally recognised as an overwhelming success. The Australian heroine from start, when she carried the Olympic torch into the stadium, to finish, as she crossed the line to take 400m gold, was the indigenous athlete Cathy Freeman. Against the will of many of her still oppressed people, she came to represent the symbol, albeit shallow, of reconciliation between White Australia and Indigenous Australia. But the frenzy of flames and fireworks surrounding the Games blinded the rest of the world to the real history behind it all…
1:02:44Using camera footage recorded by protesters at the scene of the World Trade Organisation riots in the United States during November 1999, Breaking The Spell documents the events of the time from the perspective of the activists, following the massive ‘controversial’ street protests and ensuing confrontations with police. Rather than attempting to cover every situation at the WTO, Breaking the Spell covers a few scenes in depth, filmed in the thick of the action, including footage that aired nationally on 60 Minutes…
33:37War Zone is a short film about street harassment. Filmmaker Maggie Hadleigh-West walks crowded urban streets armed with a camera and microphone, trailed by one or two women also with cameras. Whenever a man harasses her, with ogling or words, she turns the camera on him, moves in close, and questions his behaviour. The questions are not usually for dialogue but more for making him as uncomfortable as he’s made her. More than 50 such encounters are included: the men react with bravado, embarrassment, or anger. None apologise. Interspersed are the filmmaker’s voice-over stories of growing up and dealing with men, as well as interviews with several women who talk about how they handle similar street harassment and what they feel about it. What does it feel like to be a woman on the street in a cultural environment that does nothing to discourage men from heckling, following, touching or disparaging women in public spaces?