Renowned independent journalist John Pilger speaks about complicity and compliance, censorship and citizen journalism as well as issues such as the holocaust in Iraq and Kevin Rudd's shrewd political apology to the Indigenous peoples of Australia as Prime Minister. "These days, a one-dimensional political culture ensures that few writers write, or speak out, as they did in the last century. They are talented, yet safe. In the media, the more people watch, the less people know. Beneath the smokescreen of objectivity and impartiality, media establishments too often ventriloquise the official line, falling silent at the sight of unpleasant truths."
Using Oliver Stone's epic film "JFK" as a springboard, Beyond JFK: The Question of Conspiracy brings together extensive research around the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963, to challenge serious flaws in the official narrative. Featuring interviews with Jim Garrison, the District Attorney who brought the conspiracy case of Clay Shaw in 1969, as well as interviews with his staff, Numa Bertel, Lou Ivon and Perry Russo; in addition to numerous reporters, eyewitnesses, archivists, and others, Beyond JFK is a cumulative look into the huge amounts of public research that went into the counter-narrative of the JFK assassination, forming the basis of the production of the JFK movie as a way of presenting the research to the public through pop-culture.
This documentary looks at the erosion of civil liberties and increase in government surveillance since 1997 in the UK with the advent of "New Labour" and Tony Blair. Modern politicians, regardless of left or right, always seem to promise hope and change, but what is delivered is more of the same. To illustrate this, the film tracks 6 key areas that have been rapidly dismantled in so-called democracies over the last few decades: Freedom of speech; the right to assemble and protest; the presumption of innocence; the right to privacy; detention without charge, the prohibition on torture...
John Pilger returns to the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza where, in 1974, he filmed a documentary with the same title -- Palestine Is Still The Issue -- a film about the same issues, a nation of people, the Palestinians, forced off their land and subjected to military occupation by Israel. Pilger hears extraordinary stories from Palestinians, though most of his interviews are with Israelis whose voices are seldom heard, including the remarkable witness of a man who lost his daughter in a suicide bombing. But for Palestinians, the overriding, routine terror, day after day, has been the ruthless control of almost every aspect of their lives, as if they live in an open prison. This film is about the Palestinians and a group of courageous Israelis united in the fight to be free...
Salmon Confidential follows renowned biologist Alexandra Morton as she finds that wild salmon are testing positive for dangerous European salmon viruses associated with industrial salmon farming worldwide, and then, how a chain of events is set off by the Canadian government to suppress the findings. Scientists are gagged, research suppressed, evidence not allowed. With the industrial fish farms having moved into Morton's neighbourhood in the late 1980s, since then, there has been a serious decline in wild salmon in the region. So, tracking her findings, the film follows Morton and her team as they move from courtrooms, to Canada's most remote rivers, Vancouver grocery stores and sushi restaurants, providing insights into the workings of government agencies tasked with managing the 'safety of fish and food supply,' that always seem to put industry and the needs of corporations over the natural world, time and time again. Salmon Confidential becomes a call to action to help save the wild salmon from these atrocities, before they're completely wiped out forever.