Outage: We're currently experiencing server problems in certain regions. Please check back soon if titles are not working for you.Films about governments
58:37In 1978, Australia was shocked by the explosion of a massive bomb placed in a rubbish bin outside the Sydney Hilton Hotel in NSW. The perpetrators were never found. However, evidence that the Australian security and intelligence forces may have been responsible resulted in the NSW State Parliament unanimously calling for an inquiry in 1991 and then again in 1995. The Federal Government vetoed any inquiry. No investigation was held. The government then set-up the Australian Federal Police and increased support for “anti-terrorist measures”…
1:19:14By providing a striking comparison of U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, Peace, Propaganda and The Promised Land zeros in on how structural distortions in U.S. media coverage have reinforced false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how, through the use of language, framing and the context of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza remains hidden in the news media…
13:08Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of characters with shady connections—former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort. US military’s contractors pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting—a deadly irony…
1:21:45Filmed over three years, Hacking Democracy documents a group of American citizens investigating anomalies and irregularities with the electronic voting systems used during the 2000 and 2004 US Presidential elections. The investigation revolves around the flawed integrity and security of the machines, particularly those made by the Diebold corporation. Could the elections have been rigged?
1:41:04This 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…
52:49John 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…
1:27:44Every day, escalating technologies are being used to monitor all of us as populations with unprecedented scrutiny—from driving habits to workplace surveillance, as shoppers, as consumers, as citizens. We are all increasingly being observed and analysed. Internet searches are monitored and used as evidence in court, the police track our movements on the road, governments collect our DNA, fingerprints and iris scans, corporations assemble huge databases for profiling and selling data, while governments collude with such lucrative businesses—for example, Acxiom, Lexis Nexis and ChoicePoint—to gain access to vast volumes of information about people and the machinations of modern society. What will it take for us to stop this system before it boils over into a full-blown technocratic authoritarian regime?
52:28Over half a century, Rupert Murdoch’s rapacious business audacity has built one of the world’s most powerful and ubiquitous media empires. But with revelations of bribery, blackmail, collusion with police and government, wiretapping and other invasions on privacy, the empire seems to be showing cracks. The scandal has prompted criminal investigations on both sides of the Atlantic and also broken open the insular world of the Murdoch family, its news executives, and the vast political elite who court their favour. Murdoch’s Scandal tells the story of the battle over the future of News Corporation and the challenging of the extensive media empire…
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…
1:33:45In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg shook the United States to its foundations when he leaked top-secret Pentagon documents to the New York Times that showed how five Presidents consistently lied about the Vietnam War. Consequently, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger called Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America,” who “had to be stopped at all costs.” But Ellsberg wasn’t stopped. Facing 115 years in prison on espionage and conspiracy charges, he fought back…
1:18:26Golden Rule presents a picture of today’s political economy interpreted through the framework of the “Investment Theory of political Parties”. The theory, first articulated in 1983 by Thomas Ferguson, is largely based on quantitative analysis of activity in the stock market and its relationship to politics—that is to say that “elections are moments when groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state.” The film takes this theory and tests it against developments in the political and social spheres of recent decades, right up to the election of Barack Obama in the United States in 2008…
1:17:43The global growth of Rupert Murdoch’s media enterprise is cause for concern. The concentration of media ownership on a global scale in the hands of one man infringes on the freedom of the press by definition at the very least. But the real life example here is Fox News and it’s own claim of being “Fair and Balanced” — one only has to look at the coverage of the invasion of Iraq for example, or “commentators” such as Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity and the interactions they have with their “guests”; the vast political connections between Fox News, the Whitehouse and the Pentagon propaganda unit; the suppressed news stories, the censorship, the manipulation and control over the “news” by Murdoch and the president Roger Ailes themselves, not to mention the control over reporters, with former journalists alleging that Fox News asked them to lie and when they refused they were fired. Even lawsuits entailed from this with the court ruling that it is not against the law to lie on a news program…
52:51Pepsi vs. Coke in The Ice Cold War traces the history of the worldwide struggle for soft drink supremacy by the Coca Cola Company, against the backdrop of World War II. The war was the perfect vehicle for Coca-Cola distribution, including to the Nazis. Bottling plants on front lines were paid for by the US war department. Nixon got Kremlin supremo, Khrushchev, to pose drinking Pepsi, which became the first US product made in the Soviet Union. In 1949, Mao kicked Coca-Cola out of China. President Carter got it back in 1978. In Chile, Pepsi Cola’s boss ran a daily paper which was used by the CIA to help Pinochet’s bloody coup…
53:53Through a secret program called the Counter Intelligence Program or ‘COINTELPRO’, the United States government set out to “disrupt dissident political organisations using infiltration, psychological warfare, harassment through the legal system and extralegal force and violence”. Groups such as the Black Panther Party and others throughout the civil rights movement were targets of the program. COINTELPRO — The FBI’s War On Black America establishes a historical perspective on the measures initiated by the FBI which aimed to discredit black political figures and forces of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Combining declassified documents, interviews, rare footage and exhaustive research, it investigates the government’s role in the assassinations of Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and Martin Luther King…
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?
43:46Australian journalist, author and film maker John Pilger speaks about global media consolidation, war by journalism, the US military and its quest for domination/hegemony in the post 9-11 era and the false history that is presented in the guise of ‘objective’ journalism…
47:39Robert Beckford visits Ghana to investigate the hidden costs of rice, chocolate and gold and why, 50 years after independence, a country so rich in ‘natural resources’ is one of the poorest in the world. He discovers child labourers farming cocoa instead of attending school and asks if the activities of multinationals, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have actually made the country’s problems worse…
1:09:06During a town hall meeting in central Los Angeles 1996, then CIA Director John Deutch made an appearance on a panel of government representatives to refute documented allegations that the CIA had sold drugs in Los Angeles in order to finance covert operations in Central America. Questions are put forward by many people, including author and investigative journalist Michael Ruppert who explains of documented evidence of direct CIA involvement in drug trafficking, making mention of covert operations…
1:16:29On December 7, 1975 with the complicity of many Western governments including the US, the UK, and Australia, Indonesia secretly invaded the small nation of East Timor. In the intervening 18 years, an estimated 200,000 East Timorese or one third of the population, had been slaughtered by the Indonesian military — using US and British planes to bombard the island, while Western defence ministers proclaimed ignorance. As John Pilger tapes an Australian diplomat admitting that East Timor was considered “expendable”, no one watching the massacre can excuse the geopolitical machinations that led to this genocide…
1:53:35Lifting The Veil explores the historical role of political parties in the United States as the graveyard of social movements, the massive influence of corporate financing in elections, the absurd disparities of wealth, the continuity and escalation of neoconservative policies with the Obama administration, the insufficiency of mere voting as a path to reform, and differing conceptions of democracy itself. Lifting The Veil exposes the vast hypocrisy of the United States government, with a sense of urgency to bring about real systemic social and political change…
1:32:27Why was the the electric vehicle made by General Motors destroyed in the late 1990s? Why did it receive only limited commercialisation despite being hugely popular? It was among the fastest, most efficient production cars ever built. It ran on electricity, produced no exhaust and catapulted American technology to the forefront of the automotive industry. The lucky few who drove it never wanted to give it up. So why did General Motors suddenly crush its fleet of EV-1 electric vehicles in the Arizona desert? Was it because of a lack of consumer confidence or conspiracy?
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…
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.
45:20The shocking story of a well respected Indigenous community leader in outback Western Australia who was locked in a metal cell in the back of a prison van and driven through the desert in the searing heat. Four hours later he was dead. Reporter Liz Jackson reveals the tragic train of events that led to this death, despite repeated warnings that Western Australia’s prisoner transport system was unsafe and inhumane…
44:27From its origins as the Office of Strategic Services in the 1950s until present as the CIA, president Harry Truman’s creation has been the object of mystery, thrills and fear to people all over the world with even the White House fearing the agency. With resources to assassinate political leaders, overthrow governments and start wars, Secrets Of The CIA documents these operations of the CIA from the perspective of ex-agents as they speak about their experiences working for the CIA, tell of what they were required to do in places like South America, Europe and in the United States, and how they enjoyed the work…
1:10:38Hijacking Catastrophe examines the evidence that neoconservatives used the September 11, 2001 attacks to usher in a new doctrine of expanding American power through military force under the guise of a “war on terror” and that the doctrine — known as the Project for the New American Century — had been laid out prior to 9/11 by its authors, which include Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush and Dan Quayle…
41:45For 20 years the NSW Crime Commission went about its business with drugs quietly. When it scored a bust, it stood back and let politicians and the police bask in credit. But all that changed with the sensational arrest of the commission’s assistant director, Mark Standen, on charges of trafficking drugs. His spectacular downfall threw a spotlight onto the Crime Commission’s remarkable array of powers and how it abuses them. Secret hearings, witnesses compelled to answer questions, broad powers of search and surveillance, no independent review process…
2:04:16Militainment Inc. examines how news coverage of war in the United States has come to resemble Hollywood film, video games, and reality television in its portrayal of war as entertainment. Using a range of media examples—from news anchors’ idolatry of military machinery to the impact of government propaganda on war reporting—Militainment Inc. asks: How has war taken its place as a spectacle of entertainment? And how does presenting war as entertainment affect the ability of the population to evaluate the real human costs of this culture’s military-industrial-complex?
33:39In the spring of 2012, a massive student strike in opposition to a tuition hike, rocked the streets of the Montréal for over six months. Protests and mass direct-action on the street became part of daily and nightly reality. Several times during the tumultuous spring, the numbers in the streets would reach over one hundred thousand. Police routinely clubbed students and their allies, and arrested them by the hundreds. Some were even banned from entering the city. But every time the cops struck, the student movement got bigger and angrier. This is a story about how the arrogance of a government underestimated a dedicated group of students, who through long-term organising, laid the foundation for some of the largest mass demonstrations in Canada’s history.
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…
1:29:27The American Blackout chronicles the 2002 defeat, and 2004 re-election, of Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney to the U.S. House of Representatives, focussing on issues surrounding voter disenfranchisement and the use of electronic voting machines in both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections…
1:12:30From conflicts of interests in politics and collusion with corporate power, to a global mainstream media that serves the interests of a powerful few, Ethos explores aspects of the machinations of today’s global systems that work against democracy, the natural environment and lead populations into consumerism and warfare…
39:40Filmed in Thailand and the Philippines in July 2007, Squeezed tells the story of how free trade agreements and globalisation are changing the lives of millions of people living in the Asia-Pacific region with APEC. Featuring interviews with farmers, workers and slum-dwellers, the film travels across the landscapes of Asia, from the lush rice paddies of Thailand to squatter settlements perched on a rubbish dump in urban Manila. Documenting these contrasts and contradictions, Squeezed accounts the impact of globalisation…
23:13For Your Eyes Only? reports on the existence of a secret government program that intercepts millions of e-mails each day in the name of ‘terrorist surveillance’. News about the program came to light when a former AT&T employee, Mark Klein, blew the whistle on a large-scale installation of secret Internet monitoring equipment deep inside AT&T’s San Francisco office. The equipment was installed at the request of the United States government to spy on all e-mail traffic across the entire Internet. Though the government and AT&T refuse to address the issue directly, Klein backs up his charges with internal company documents and personal photos…
50:02John Pilger and David Munro look behind political rhetoric to discover the hidden world of international arms dealing…
52:54The secret history of Australia is a historical conspiracy of silence. Written history has long applied selectivity to what it records, largely ignoring the shameful way that the Indigenous people were, and continue to be, treated…
1:57:53Fool Me Twice documents the Australian government’s lies about the East Timor massacres, the cover-up of the Bali bombings (including the 1993 World Trade Centre attack) and subsequent anti-terror legislation forced through parliament by the Howard government. Laws that are still in effect today…
55:54Why have a real election when you can just buy the result? In Bush Family Fortunes, Greg Palast examines various aspects of the Presidency of George W. Bush, including the very controversial 2000 US Presidential ‘election’ and of course, the invasion of Iraq. What are the Bush family connections?
45:05The Australian Federal Police—the glamour police force that was set-up after the Sydney Hilton Hotel Bombing in 1978—has enjoyed consistent showers of praise by politicians and the public ever since it’s inception. However, the once-lionised AFP is now being ridiculed for bungling, excessive secrecy and collusion after the catastrophic failings of the “terrorism case” against Dr Mohammed Haneef. Good Cop, Bad Cop reveals how the Haneef case is a symptom of the deep cultural problems that beset the AFP…
1:25:20Brussels, the capital and largest city of Belgium, has a long history of hosting the institutions of the European Union within its European Quarter; while the Union itself claims it has no capital and no plans to declare one—despite the fact that Brussels hosts the official seats of the European Commission, Council of the European Union, and European Council, as well as a seat of the European Parliament. In any event, it is here—in this centre of smoke and mirrors—that exists one of the largest concentrations of lobbyist power in the world. The Brussels Business scratches the surface of this extensive world hidden-from-view by looking at the direct influence of lobbyists and the complete lack of transparency in the decision-making processes. Speaking with lobbyists and activists themselves, The Brussels Business reveals the beginnings of a vast landscape of PR conglomerates, front companies, think-tanks and their closely-interlinking networks of power and ties to political and economic elites. The questions then become: Who actually runs the European Union? How? And why?