2:24:01Did you know that the legal system recognises a corporation as a person? What kind of 'person' is it then? What would happen if it sat down with a psychologist to discuss its behaviour and attitude towards society and the environment? Explored through specific examples, this film shows how and why the modern-day corporation has rapaciously pressed itself into the dominant institution of our time, posing big questions about what must be done if we want a equitable and sustainable world. What must we do when corporations are psychopaths?
1:08:16While corporations and governments continue to disseminate globalisation and the rapacious drive for consolidation of corporate power, people around the world are pushing back to reinstate local communities. Groups are coming together to rebuild human scale, local and ecological economies based on a new paradigm of localisation and sustainability. The Economics Of Happiness documents these shifts and shows how these communities have reclaimed their autonomy...
1:30:57Chemical flame retardants are everywhere--in our furniture, our homes, our bodies. But do they work as promised? And are they making us sick? The three chemical companies producing flame retardants would prefer that we not ask these questions, and they've spent millions of dollars on lobbyists, publicists and influencers to ensure that we don't. Toxic Hot Seat wades through the mess to piece together an intricate story of manipulation that details how Big Tobacco skillfully convinced fire safety officials to back a standard that, in effect, requires all furniture to be filled with toxic chemicals...
41:44Presented by author and activist Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth explores the phenomenon of how the social power and prominence of women has increased in the past few decades, alongside a paradoxical increase in the pressure they feel to adhere to unrealistic social standards of physical beauty, appearance and presentation. It seems the more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us. Women have breached the power structure, but meanwhile eating disorders have risen exponentially and cosmetic surgery has become a fastest-growing specialty. Pornography has become the main media category--ahead of legitimate films and records combined--and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal. How did this come to be? The Beauty Myth shows how the edacious commercial culture drives this pressure and leads to a pervasive preoccupation with appearance in both sexes, compromising the ability of women to be effective in and accepted by society. The film is a call to question the culture and redefine the notions of success, beauty and indeed what it means to be a sane human being in this toxic culture.
3:50This short film chronicles a metamorphosis of mainstream media and political power throughout the last decades, by looking at the role of the television journalist. In the early 1950s, not long after the invention of television itself, TV journalists essentially served as prompters for government figureheads and official viewpoints. This function changed somewhat however, with the political scandals of the 1960s and 70s, exemplified by Watergate, where some journalists joined the mainstream shift in society of questioning political power, big business and bureaucracy. Out of this boomed a new era of investigative journalism. But this ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall as the old certainties of "good and bad" and "right and left" were blurred and no longer simple. But rather than working to make sense of the complexity, journalism turned from moral principles to a simple reporting of experience, devoid of context. TV journalists now plead with the audience to send in photos and videos as a kind of so-called "democratised" media, but what actually functions as a vast echo-chamber of uncertainty and unaccountability.
54:55Blood Coltan travels to eastern Congo, where a bloody war is happening over a precious metal called Coltan—a raw material used in electronic devices such as computers, televisions and mobile phones. The demand for Coltan is driven by the west, funding the war in Congo between rebel militias and children as young as ten who work the mines hunting for this precious material of the technocratic age...
53:42The Gruen Effect is a biographical film of Victor Gruen, considered by some to be the grand architect of the modern shopping mall and pedestrian zone. His ideas about urban planning have led to cities that serve the new gods of consumption, developing concepts that have reshaped the modern world. But in perhaps the ultimate of ironies, a naïve Gruen initially envisioned shopping centres as utopian communal spaces that would bring people together. However, developers took these ideas to brood the emergence of suburbia and the new era of consumption that would come to define the post-war world. Viewed with a critical eye, and tracing the path from Gruen's prewar Vienna, to the 1950s America, and back to Europe in 1968, The Gruen Effect can show the themes and translation errors that have come to define intensely colonising urban life, along with a disappointed Gruen appalled at the impact shopping centres have on communities.
1:45:45Generation Wealth is a visual history of the materialistic, image, and celebrity-obsessed culture, explored through the work of photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield. Part historical essay, part autobiographical, Greenfield puts the pieces of her life's work together to reveal the pathologies that have created the richest and most unequal society the world has ever seen. Spanning consumerism, beauty, gender, body commodification, aging, and sex, Generation Wealth unpacks the global boom-bust economy, the corrupt American Dream and the human costs of capitalism, narcissism and greed.
1:25:48Blind Spot investigates the convergence of causes behind the current crisis of global industrial civilisation. By establishing the links between fossil fuels and the falsehood of perpetual exponential economic growth, Blind Spot explains the draw down of the natural environment, and how this globalised culture is systematically killing the world in its path. The energy depletion scenario known as Peak Oil—which came to pass around 2006—requires this culture to change drastically, with dire consequences either way. By whatever measure of greed, wishful thinking, neglect or ignorance, this current way of life cannot continue and the clock is ticking fast for change.
1:35:39Every day in Vienna the amount of unsold bread that is sent back and thrown away is enough to supply Austria's second-largest city, Graz. Around 350,000 hectares of agricultural land, above all in Latin America, are dedicated to the cultivation of soybeans to feed Austria’s livestock, while one quarter of the local population starves. Every European eats ten kilograms a year of artificially irrigated greenhouse vegetables from southern Spain, with water shortages as the result. We Feed The World is a film about food and globalisation, fishermen and farmers, long-distance truck drivers and high-powered corporate executives, the flow of goods and cash flow, a film about scarcity amongst plenty.
41:56Consumer capitalism dominates the economy, politics, and culture of our age, despite a growing trove of research showing that it is a failed system. In this illustrated presentation, media scholar Justin Lewis makes a compelling case that capitalism can no longer deliver on its myth of the dream and its promise to enhance the quality of life. He argues that changing direction will require changing our media system and our cultural environment, as capitalism has become economically and environmentally unsustainable. This presentation explores how the media and information industries make it difficult to envision other forms of life by limiting critical thinking and keeping us locked in a cycle of consumption, and shows us that change will only be possible if we take culture seriously and transform the very way we organise our media and communications systems.
1:28:09Sustenance
A group of friends become curious about the sustainability of their eating regiments. They instigate a challenge, and send filmmaker Yasi Gerami off on a quest to investigate the sustainability of their eating ideologies. The friends come from different backgrounds and live in Toronto, Canada, but the inquiry takes the story of their food around the globe. As Gerami digs deeper, she realises the inconvenient truths not only about the environmental catastrophes caused by our dependence on mainstream food production methods, but also by the cataclysmic social justice impact of our eating habits in the global south. The film unfolds some popular myths on topics such as plant-based diets, healthy and nutritional foods, ethical eating, food politics, industrial agriculture, and how to attain a sustainable food culture. Sustenance helps the viewer discover these themes, prompting the viewer to question where our food really comes from, and how it genuinely affects the health of other people, other species, and ultimately the entire planet.