Outage: We're currently experiencing server problems in certain regions. Please check back soon if titles are not working for you.Films by John Pilger
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.
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…
26:50Mr Nixon’s Secret Legacy covers the absurdity of the supposed logic behind “Mutual Assured Destruction” or MAD—a doctrine of military strategy and the national security policy of the United States during the cold war. During this time, MAD is supposedly disassembled, but replaced with a strategy called “Counterforce.” This film investigates the propositions of “Counterforce,” questioning the rhetoric of executing a “flexible, acceptable nuclear war.”
27:01John Pilger travels to Bangladesh to report on the horrors of the famine in the country, its causes and tragedies, circa 1975. With people passing away on the street on a daily basis from starvation and US foreign policy continually ignored, An Unfashionable Tragedy documents the plight that continues to this day, showing that food is a powerful weapon, more powerful than oil…
27:00To Know Us Is To Love Us covers the public reaction to a Vietnamese refugee camp constructed outside Fort Smith in Arkansas, 1975—not long after the end of the Vietnam war. The film documents the stories of the refugees coming to the United States, along with the reactions of American troops, the public and citizens who take in Vietnamese refugees to assimilate them into American life.
26:37A Nod And A Wink reviews the use of vague Conspiracy laws in Britain from 1975, laws which are much in the same as those used in police states such as Brazil and the Soviet Union to suppress political and moral dissent. This film raises and addresses the serious questions about the way the legal system works in Britain—and indeed elsewhere…
27:02One British Family portrays the racial minefield of British society through the eyes of a black family. The film is set in Newcastle during 1974, revealing the multifaceted aspects of internalised racism that still exists today…
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…
28:40Guilty Until Proven Innocent reports on the issue of innocent people confined to prisons on remand in the UK, circa 1974. People are imprisoned without trial and are later released with either a small fine, a set of mandatory conditions, or leave completely innocent. It’s a strange set of circumstances in a country with such pretensions of a bill of rights and espoused ‘legal protections.’ Is bail a right or a privilege?
25:51Thalidomide: The Ninety-Eight We Forgot follows a four-year investigation on behalf of a group of children damaged at birth by the drug Thalidomide which was introduced in the late 1950s to treat morning sickness and to aid sleep. The drug caused birth deformities, such as phocomelia, with more than 10,000 children in 46 countries born with deformities. This film investigates why a group of people are excluded from compensation from the effects of Thalidomide by various legal proceedings—still relevant today in the context of how the legal system continues to protect corporations at the expense of life itself.
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.