Trafficked
Trafficked is a set of two films that follow a former-police officer’s quest to find the man who enslaved a young Thai girl in a Sydney brothel. The series explores the trafficking of women and children for prostitution as a global problem. The United Nations estimates that more than one million children are forced into sexual slavery each year. Some of them are trafficked into Australia.
1:23:57Ray Kurzweil, noted inventor and futurist, is a man who refuses to accept physical reality and the inevitability of death. Instead, he claims that the trending exponential increase in the growth of information technology can continue indefinitely, and that a so-called “singularity” will emerage—a point where humans and machines will converge, allowing one to “transcend” biological “limitations.” But there are many who share deep concerns about the consequences of working towards Kurzweil’s world…
1:36:16Trashed sets out to discover the extent and effects of garbage on the natural world. The film travels to beautiful destinations now tainted by pollution, through conversations with scientists, politicians, and people whose health and livelihoods have been fundamentally effected by waste. We see unfettered garbage dumping in Lebanon effecting its own coastline, but also the entire Mediterranean sea; toxic waste mounds set near a school and a future hospital in England; garbage incinerators in Iceland and Japan; the effects of plastic, microplastics, chemical sludge, flame retardants, pesticides, herbicides, dioxins, and other chemicals from waste and their synergistic impacts the world over. Trashed is a call for urgent action to resolve the issue of existing waste, to drastically reduce consumption and output to significantly less harmful levels, while demonstrating how this is already being reached for in many communities around the world.
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.
1:25:15Truth in Numbers? Everything, According to Wikipedia explores the cultural implications and background of one of the most visited and referenced sites on the Internet. What is the role and impact of Wikipedia in the archiving of information and the preservation of culture? What will it leave behind? This film examines the unfolding legacy by weaving multiple perspectives about the impact of Wikipedia and provoking a deeper conversation on how knowledge is formed and what future generations will learn about history and the world…
47:16In March 2003 thousands of Australian troops and others were sent to fight a ‘war’ as part of a pre-emptive strike on the sovereign nation of Iraq, a country from whom there was no threat. Two years on, in the wake of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties, the Australian military reports its first casualty in the conflict while the American death toll stands at nearly two thousand. This being the a result of an invasion which has all but destroyed a foreign nation and seen millions made homeless, families destroyed, hundreds of thousands of deaths, leaving a legacy of destruction and religious division instilled in its wake. How did the Australian government come to play a part in this terror?
1:01:19Tūhoe — History Of Resistance documents the fight for justice of the Tūhoe people of Te Urewera, Aotearoa (New Zealand). Set on contested land in the Urewera ranges of the middle North Island, the film presents the ways of Māori—the indigenous peoples of the land.
55:31In 1960, NBC aired what is widely considered to be the first reality television show in American broadcast history. Billing itself as a new kind of visual reporting, the show was called Story of a Family, and it purported to document the day-to-day lives of the 10-member Robertson family of Amarillo, Texas. While the show has long since faded from public memory, media scholars and television historians have long recognised its significance as a precursor to the “unscripted programming” that dominates television today. TV Family draws on this history by interviewing several of the children featured in Story of a Family, to offer a fascinating behind-the-scenes account of how the show was made, and what it means to shape culture. Weaving personal anecdotes with commentary from historians and scholars, TV Family reveals the story of how the show’s producers carefully choreographed the way they wanted the family to appear to the American public—all in the name of “authenticity.” The result is an eye-opening look at one of television’s earliest successes in shaping the reality of family life in commercially viable ways.
1:08:32A few weeks after the September 11 attacks in 2001, the United States congress quickly passed the USA PATRIOT Act—a complicated and controversial law which was purportedly required to help with tracking future terrorist threats. Unconstitutional sets out to explain this law and examine its true impact. Citing a trove of examples from people whose lives have been directly effected, what we see is how law enforcement has rounded up Muslims and people with Arabic names to detain them for wild unspecified lengths of time without due process or even charges; the massive curtailment of civil liberties; erosion of enshrined privacy rights, increases in surveillance; and the abuses of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
1:08:32Unconstitutional investigates the ways in which the civil liberties of citizens and immigrants have been rolled back in the United States since September 11, 2001; and the PATRIOT Act. The film details some stories behind those affected—from law-abiding store clerks to United States Olympians unable to travel.
1:20:13Uncounted 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…
48:55Nina Hobson, an officer in the Leicestershire police force, leaves the force disillusioned at the rampant culture of sexism, apathy and neglect that is rife amongst the institution. Five years later, Nina returns to the police force, but this time as an undercover journalist to document the culture behind the scenes, blowing the whistle. Filmed over four months, gaining unprecedented access to officers, Nina secretly captures footage first-hand showing the various ways the culture perpetuates itself. Reports of sexual assault and rape are not taken seriously, to the extent that in one scene, a female police officer says that if she was ever raped, she would not report it to the police. We see multiple cases where officers turn away from domestic violence incidents because they do not want to turn up, or do not want to answer emergency calls because they are out to get a meal instead. In another scene, officers are playing poker and indoor cricket rather than attending to others who are working with prisoners or doing patrol work. In another scene, a police officer boasts about how he pretended not to see someone injured and bleeding because he had a football match to watch while on duty. The examples continue. The result is that Undercover Copper not only exposes the brutality of these specific incidents, but posits fundamental questions about the police as an institution itself, embedded in a larger culture that is apathetic, misogynist, and self-interested. It shows just how much needs to be done to turn this around.
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.
29:56It is said that young people are apparently doing away with the old ways of romance and dating, and going straight for sex, and that it’s this rise of hookup culture on college campuses especially, that is highlighted as the process of changing some of our most basic assumptions about heterosexual sex and gender. But for all the speculation, there’s been little beyond anecdotal proof to back any of these claims up. Understanding Hookup Culture is a presentation by Paula England, a researcher in the sociology of gender, that aims to clarify what’s actually going on. England traverses a wealth of data to begin to chart whether the phenomenon of hook-up culture represents some kind of fundamental change, or whether we’re simply seeing age-old gender patterns dressed up in new social forms.
24:16Sales pitches and PR for gas drilling are quick to dismiss claims that gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing processes are controversial. The direct evidence on the ground throughout the United States tells a different story however — toxic chemical spills, gas leeching, contaminated water supplies throughout the country, as well as many documented cases of ill health and sickness. As energy companies look to frack elsewhere outside the United States — in Europe, South Africa, Australia — The Fracking Façade provides yet more timely evidence of the warnings to heed from fracking and it’s devastating ecological impact so far…
59:46A failed GM cotton crop prompts farmer suicides in India. Windborne GM canola contaminates organic and conventional farms in Canada. One farmer fights Monsanto in the Supreme Court. A company seeks approval for giant GM salmon that may threaten the survival of the natural species. GM pigs are born with ghastly mutations. And experts reveal how inadequate testing and regulations put us at risk. Featuring interviews with Vandana Shiva, Andrew Kimbrell, Percy Schmeiser and others, this documentary reveals several harsh consequences of genetic engineering worldwide…
57:10Unprecedented looks at voting irregularities in the controversial presidential election in the United States from the year 2000. With a focus on the swing state of Florida, the recount, the ensuing supreme court decision in December, and future elections; the film also shows how fundamentally, many people—the majority being African-American—have outright been refused the ability to vote by a clever mix of legalese, electronic voting machines, political maneuvering and simple racism. A 1868 law prevented felons from voting—originally crafted to keep blacks from the polls in the wake of the Civil War—was resurrected in 2000, used to create a computerised list of people supposedly illegible to vote. The list had weird parameters and included as many as 57,000 to 91,000 non-felons; overwhelmingly targeting people of colour. On election day, these people were turned away at the polls. The role of electronic voting machines is also examined, as they are totally unaccountable and do not allow audits. The argument is made because of copyright over the software and trademarks. The machines also do not give paper receipts, so there is no physical evidence in case of the need for a recount. How does the United States—the so-called and self-proclaimed world-famous democracy—fair as one in light of this?
40:22In 2013, seventeen-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons took her own life. She had been gang-raped a year and a half earlier by her classmates and labeled a “slut” as a result. Despite transferring schools many times, she could not escape constant online harassment and in-person bullying. But Rehtaeh’s story is horribly not the only one like this to make headlines in recent years. Why is the sexual shaming of girls and women, especially sexual assault victims, still so prevalent throughout this culture? UnSlut tackles this question through a series of conversations with those who have experienced sexual shaming and how it manifests, while also offering immediate and long-term goals for personal and institutional change.
48:05Unwritten Future documents the events during the Republican National Convention in 2008 where excessive use of force and questionable tactics by police are on full show. Even peaceful radio host Amy Goodman is arrested. The film is dispersed with interviews with activists, asking them what they are fighting for, contrasted with police response and the aftermath.
1:33:27Up 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…
48:00Focusing specifically on mines in Canada, Uranium examines the hazards of uranium mining, the toxic and radioactive waste involved at every stage of the process, as well as the wholistic way that indigenous communities have been violated and destroyed by mining and refining practices throughout the country and the world…
52:53In Europe, nuclear energy is popularly touted as supposedly the best way to “save the climate.” But what’s wrong with that argument? Nuclear power stations run on uranium and the by-products are harmful, toxic and controversial for hundreds of thousands of years, not to mention the many dangerous effects of mining for the mineral on the environment and humanity…
2:02:24US Foreign Policy — The War Against The Third World is a video compilation series of 10 segments about CIA covert operations and military interventions since World War II.
1:50:06Utopia is both an epic portrayal of the oldest continuous human culture on the planet—indigenous Australia—and an investigation into a suppressed colonial past and rapacious present. One of the world’s best kept secrets is revealed against the great Australian ‘mining boom,’ showing how the country’s racially divided past and current-day media collusion play their parts in a system that is apartheid in all but name. The film examines the exploitation of the Aboriginal population, both as a people and of the land they have lived on for centuries, and how so many institutions have profited while people continue to suffer. The injustice stretches across countless generations and stories. Utopia reveals this universal story of power and resistance, driven by old imperatives, in a media age of saturation which is profoundly silent and complicit; a call to continue resistance.
1:27:51Bees have been mysteriously disappearing, literally vanishing from their hives. Known as ‘Colony Collapse’, the phenomenon has brought the commercial food industry to crisis. Commercial honeybee operations pollinate monocrops that make up one out of every three bites of food in the western world. Vanishing Of The Bees follows beekeepers David Hackenberg and Dave Mendes as they strive to keep their bees healthy and fulfil pollination contracts across the United States; examining the alarming disappearance of honeybees and the greater meaning it holds about the relationship between industrial culture and ecology…
1;22:41As an exposé of human trafficking, Very Young Girls follows a group of adolescent African-American girls who were seduced, abused and sold on New York’s streets by pimps, having survived the life to share their story. Each recount their experiences, captured alongside startling footage shot by the brazen pimps themselves, giving a rare glimpse into how the cycle of street life begins for many women. Following the work of Rachel Lloyd and the journey each go through to exit their life on the streets, Very Young Girls portrays first-hand the occurrences of human trafficking throughout the United States.
53:51For the people of Vietnam, war is not over. Three generations on from 1975, babies are still being born with serious birth defects and genetic abnormalities — the legacy of the United States intensive use of chemical weapons. To this day, it is still unknown just how many have been affected. In 2005, on the eve of a historic lawsuit to determine the culpability of the United States, this film directly portrays the powerful effects of Agent Orange.
26:42After the 1973 Paris Agreement and military ceasefire, more than 70,000 soldiers and civilians had been killed in Vietnam. Vietnam — Still America’s War investigates how the Vietnamese populace still have to contend with mines and other legacies of the war, even after the ceasefire, and after the war…
51:00In 1975, John Pilger reported the end of the Vietnam War from the American Embassy in Saigon, where the last American troops fled from the roof-top helicopter pad. Twenty years later, he returns to Vietnam to revive the Vietnamese past and present from the plethora of fake Hollywood images which pity the invader, and overshadow one of the most epic struggles of the 20th century.
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.
56:45Vietnam: The Secret Agent is an investigation of the history, effects, and implications of the deadly compound “2,4,5-T,” a main ingredient of the chemical weapon code-named Agent Orange, which the United States sprayed throughout Vietnam during 1961 to 1971. Its toxicological effects are still seen today, generations later: cancers, birth defects, physical deformities, deaths, contaminated soil in which dioxins bio-accumulate and concentrate in the food cycle. The chemical started as a herbicide in agriculture from the 1940s to 1970s, but was the first to be used in war, to similar effect. The film focuses on the exposure of these toxins to both citizens and soldiers alike, exposed through the lens of archival and battle-field footage, in support of interviews with veterans, scientists, attorneys and representatives of Dow Chemical—the company that made the chemical weapons—and the United States government, that used them against the world.
25:03Away from its busy capital city and famous canal, Panama is one of the world’s most ecologically diverse nations. Yet huge new hydroelectric dam projects now underway are seeing pristine rivers damned and virgin rainforest flooded. The government says it is vital for ‘economic growth’, with international corporate interests rushing into the country, and even the United Nations awarding ‘carbon credits’ on the basis that the resultant energy will be “sustainably produced”. But for the indigenous Ngabe people—whose homes are vanishing under water—it is a catastrophe, and they are fighting back…
1:17:54What drives a young Westerner to volunteer as a peace activist in the Middle East? Visit Palestine follows Caiomhe Butterly—a young woman from Dublin, Ireland; who is one of a growing number of volunteers who risk their own lives to intervene in the long-running and bloody conflict of the occupation of Palestine. Activists such as Butterly are usually stereotyped as lunatics, meddlers or saints. This film offers a first-hand insight into a brave, honest, determined yet self-critical woman who takes direct action to the limit, with no quest for glory. The film also serves as a real conduit into the everyday lives of Palestinians, fighting for their lives…
1:37:38Walmart is an iconic American company, known worldwide for selling cheap retail goods. While economists and global marketers call Walmart a success, there are many stories of mistreatment of employees, and a general feeling of mistrust and discontent among the businesses it has destroyed, such as local community stores. Walmart — High Cost Of Low Prices highlights that it is worth being aware of the labour, social and corporate governance practices of companies that you do business with…
51:54War 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.
1:10:15Reaching 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…
49:54War Matters chronicles a decade of anti-war protest in Britain through the story of veteran peace campaigner Brian Haw, who camped in Parliament Square for over 10 years in protest against the UK government’s policies in the Middle East. Brian began his campaign against war on 2nd June 2001, initially in protest of the sanctions against Iraq. After the September 11 attacks in the United States later on that year, Brian’s campaign took on a whole new level of importance. War Matters documents this shift by examining the larger issue of the British arms trade and the repercussions of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars around the world, as civil rights are being curtailed in so-called democracies. Where does democracy end and tyranny begin?
1:34:00Set 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…
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?
57:45How can we make political change if peaceful demonstration is not effective and violence only brings more violence? War/Peace posits this question by reintroducing two surviving figures from the Weather Underground movement of the late 1960s, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. Coming from the hippy counterculture, the Weather Underground was a radical militant organisation, with revolutionary positions characterised by the Black Power and civil rights movements, as well as opposition to the Vietnam War. In 1970, the group issued a “Declaration of a State of War” against the United States government, with the goal to overthrow the government and end United States’ imperialism, culminating in a bombing campaign targeting government buildings along with several banks. War/Peace rewinds to the past to draw out the complexity of these political struggles, and what went wrong, while drawing parallels to the struggles of today, where a lot has changed, but a lot has also remained the same.