1:24:33Jesus Camp follows several young children as they prepare to attend an event called 'Kids on Fire,' a Christian summer camp run by Becky Fischer. Through interviews with Fisher, the children, and others, Jesus Camp illustrates the unswerving belief of the faithful—a housewife and home-schooling mother tells her son that creationism has all the answers; footage from inside the camp shows young children weeping and wailing as they promise to stop their sinning; child after child is driven to tears. These scenes are contrasted with clips from another Christian radio host who is appalled by such happenings. Are these children being brainwashed?
1:38:35Loose 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 renowned 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.
48:11Google or Wikipedia? Those of us who search online are getting referred more and more to Wikipedia. For the past two years, this free online “encyclopaedia of the people” has been topping the lists of the world’s most popular websites. But do we really know what we’re using? The Truth According To Wikipedia plunges into the story behind Wikipedia and explores the powerful world of ‘Web 2.0’ -- Is it a revolution, or pure hype?
The Living Dead: Three Films About the Power of the Past is a series of films that investigate the way that history and memory (both national and individual) have been manipulated and distorted by politicians and others for various means of control...
Pandora's Box -- A fable from the age of science, is a six part series examining the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism, tying together communism in the Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, economy in the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, Kwame Nkrumah's leadership in Ghana during the 1950s and 1960s and the history of nuclear power.
1:21:34Within a single generation, digital media, the Internet and the World Wide Web have transformed virtually every aspect of modern culture, from the way we learn and work to the ways in which we socialise and even conduct war. But is technology moving faster than we can adapt to it? Is our constantly-wired-world causing us to lose as much as we’ve apparently gained? In Digital Nation, Douglas Rushkoff and Rachel Dretzin explore what it means to be human in a 21st-century digital world...
42:46Patent applications for the "Monsanto Pig" were published in February 2005 at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) in Geneva. A researcher monitoring patent applications uncovered the fact that Monsanto is seeking patents not only on methods of breeding, but on actual breeding herds of pigs as well as the offspring that result. And as the seeds of the world are slowly being taken over by Monsanto, the company is aiming to extend its control to animals by patenting and thus privatising gene sequences--all of which are found and occur naturally and are not invented...
46:47In the "race to feed the planet", scientists have discovered how to manipulate DNA and produce what they claim are stronger, more disease-resistant crops. However, fears that Genetically Modified Food may not be safe for humans or the environment has sparked intense protest. Are we participating in a dangerous global nutritional experiment? This film asks is the question -- is the production of genetically modified food a panacea for world hunger or a mass poisoning of the worlds food supply?
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...
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...
50:53How does one sell a war? This was a question that weighed heavy on the minds of those in the United States government long before the invasion even started. Operation Saddam: America’s Propaganda Battle takes a look at the marketing of war -– a cocktail of distortion, lies and forgeries -– as shown by former secret service agent Ray McGovern, American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh and best-selling author John MacArthur, presenting the individual stages of the propaganda battle, by which American, British and other governments sought to justify the second invasion of Iraq...
40:24As the U.S. stands at the brink of invasion into Iraq, many are now warning about the potential consequences: the danger of getting 'bogged down' in Baghdad, the prospect of long-time allies leaving America's side, the possibility of chaos in the Middle East, the threat of 'renewed terrorism'. The Bush administration insiders who helped define the doctrine of pre-emption and who have argued most forcefully for invasion, are determined to set a course that will "remake America's role in the world"...
1:18:08Taxi 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...
1:34:22The untold history of The Project for the New American Century is no more. This film exposes how every major war in US history was based on a complete fraud with video of insiders themselves admitting it. This documentary shows how the first film theatres in the US were used over a hundred years ago to broadcast propaganda to rile the American people into the Spanish-American War; the white papers of the oil company Unocal which called for the creation of a pipeline through Afghanistan and how their exact needs were fulfilled through the US invasion of Afghanistan; how Halliburton under their "cost plus" exclusive contract with the US Government went on a mad dash spending spree akin to something out of the movie Brewster's Millions...
1:14:02The film is a video essay by Professor Albert Bartlett essentially serving as an introduction to the concept of steady growth and doubling time, by taking us through the impacts and consequences of exponential growth on a finite planet. By making good observations of this impossible growth as applied to fossil-fuel consumption, population and the endless growth of which the global economy requires, this presentation gives us the basic tools to fundamentally understand that we've got a real problem on our hands.
1:08:51Recorded by over 100 media activists, this film tells the story of the enormous street protests in Seattle, Washington in November 1999, against the World Trade Organisation summit. Vowing to oppose--among other faults--the WTO's power to arbitrarily overrule nations' environmental, social and labour policies in favour of unbridled corporate greed, thousands of people from all around the United States came out in force to stop the summit. Against them was a brutal police force and a hostile media. This Is What Democracy Looks Like documents the struggle, as well as providing a narrative to the history of success and failure of modern political resistance movements.
1:12:12Bullshit follows environmental activist Vandana Shiva as she travels around the world to in her quest to eliminate the use of genetically modified foods and seeds in her home country of India and other developing countries. Shiva argues that the “ownership of life” through the patenting of natural products, namely grains altered through genetic modification (GMOs), is not in our best interests, and is in fact harmful to agriculture in developing countries...
1:27:26Having received a tip from an employee at a farm where animals were being abused, including a claim that pigs were being hung by chains and strangled to death as a form of 'euthanasia,' the Humane Farming Association (HFA) turns to an undercover investigator going by the name of "Pete." While wearing a hidden camera, Pete secretly films while he works undercover as a farmhand at Wiles documenting numerous incriminating scenes, including piglets being tossed into crates from across a room, impregnated sows held in pens impeding their ability to move, an unhealthy piglet being hit against a wall to kill it, and a sick sow being hung by a chain from a forklift until it choked to death. Having obtained this evidence, Pete concludes his investigation and quits the job at the farm. In the subsequent trial carried by the HFA, the prosecutors and the defence argue the legality and morality of these practices. The presiding judge describes it as "distasteful and offensive," however, rules that such are the realities of factory farming...
44:03In the late 1990s, the Reserve Bank of Australia thought it was on a winner. The bank had developed the technology to create polymer bank notes that it claimed rivalled paper money. So the Reserve Bank decided to set up a subsidiary company called Securency to sell the technology to the world. It had just one problem though—getting legitimate access to other central bank officials to pitch the idea. So instead, Securency decided to employ a shadow network of local "fixer agents" to make "connections" with relevant officials, lavishing them with prostitutes, cash, and bribing them into deals. Dirty Money is the story of this institutional corruption at the highest level of finance in Australia.
51:18Featuring George Bush's famous "go-shopping-speech" calling for a war against terrorism that deters the nation from the fear of consumption; Castro responding with hymns to the anti-consumerist, advertising-free island of Cuba; Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer preaching that the computer will give us peace on earth, and "bring people together rather than isolate them"; while Adbuster Kalle Lasn warns that advertising pollutes us mentally, that over-consumption is unsustainable, that we are running out of oil and this will cause a global economic collapse...
Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet is a documentary series written and hosted by Mark Stephens under the pseudonym Robert X. Cringely as a sequel to Triumph of the Nerds. The series follows on by documenting the development of ARPANET, the Internet, the World Wide Web and the resulting dot-com bubble of the mid and late 1990s...
53:095th June 1989, Tiananmen Square, Beijing. After weeks of mass killing, oppression and violence by the Chinese government against it's own people, the image of a lone man standing defiant with his shopping to a line of tanks still lives on...
21:30From 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?
58:12Is the world heading for a population crisis? Since 1950, the human population has more than doubled. What is the effect of this rapid growth on the environment? While much of the projected growth in human population is likely to come from the so-called "developing world," it is the lifestyle enjoyed by the West that has the most impact--in the UK consumers use as much as two and a half times their fair share of Earth's resources. This film examines whether it is the duty of individuals to commit not only to smaller families, but to change the way they live for the sake of humanity and planet Earth.
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...
In the 1970s, acid rain and other ecological concerns were at the fore and it was at this time that climate change first became a pressing political issue. But the concern wasn't global warming -- it was the threat of a new ice age. So how did the scientific community manage to get it so very wrong? Uncovered 30 years later, the secret government organisation known as "Jason", produces the first official report on global warming in 1979. Fast forward to the mid 1980s and global warming had already become a serious political issue. However, it is not until the 1990s that the issue turns out to become one of the biggest scientific controversies of the age...
1:35:25Humanity is absolutely dependent on animals as part of life. In industrial society however, this has extended to animals as pets, 'entertainment' and for expendable use in scientific research -- animals are tortured for 'scientific tests', locked in cages as pets and at the zoo and are bred on mass for cheap meat. What does this say about industrial civilisation? Earthlings conducts an in-depth study into pet stores, puppy mills and animals shelters, as well as factory farms, the leather and fur trades, sports and entertainment industries, and the medical and scientific profession, using hidden cameras to directly show the day-to-day practices of some of the largest industries in the world...
58:49Bees are the number one insect pollinator on the planet, helping the reproduction of many species of plants—apples, berries, cucumbers, nuts, cabbages, cotton—all of which industrial agriculture blindly relies on. But the bees are dying in their millions. Empty hives have been reported across the globe. In England, the matter has caused bee-keepers to march on parliament to call for research. But perhaps we can know what's going on already. Who Killed The Honey Bee? is a mainstream-media investigation into the collapse of bee populations from a tragic anthropocentric perspective, travelling across the farms of California to the flatlands of East Anglia to the outback of Australia. The film-makers talk to bee-keepers whose livelihoods are threatened by colony collapse disorder, to scientists that are looking at the problem, to Australian bee-keepers who are making a fortune replacing dying bees in other countries for industrial agriculture. Is the reason for declining bee populations due to some kind of plague, pesticides, malnutrition or combination of these? Or is the real underlying answer something more fundamental?