51:50As Wednesday, July 13, 1977 dawned hot and humid, New Yorkers prepared themselves for another sweltering day. It was the first day of a nine-day heat wave that would become the hottest in New York City history. The once-booming city had been suffering years of economic decline. It was on the verge of bankruptcy--both unemployment rates and crime rates were high, police and fire-fighters had been laid off, municipal services including sanitation and after-school programs had been cut, and a serial killer named 'Son of Sam' was still on the loose, keeping everyone on edge. When a severe thunderstorm hit, the lights went out, and some eight million people plunged into darkness in New York City and surrounding areas. By the time the power was fully restored more than a day later, some 1,600 businesses had been looted, more than 3,000 people had been arrested, and fire-fighters had battled more than 1,000 fires.
Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich is a miniseries about convicted sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein based on the 2016 book of the same name by James Patterson, and co-written by John Connolly and Tim Malloy. The four-part documentary features interviews with several survivors including Virginia Giuffre and Maria Farmer, along with former staff members and former police chief Michael Reiter, a key individual from the first criminal case against Epstein. The series provides insight into the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein, and how he used his wealth and power to commit his crimes.
Surviving Jeffrey Epstein is a four-part series that investigates the convicted sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein who used his power, influence, and finances to not only shield his predatory sexual behaviour over several decades, but successfully manipulated the justice system to avoid true penalty. Deals made in secret. Investigations suppressed. Connections to the rich and powerful, participating in the web of trafficking across the globe. Eight survivors share their stories across the series, including the testimony of Courtney Wild, Rachel Kay Benavides, and Virginia Roberts Giuffre. Through the strength of their resolve and other survivors, the series shines a light on Epstein's tentacles, and the pursuit for real justice.
Can't Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World is a six-part series that explores how modern society has arrived to the strange place it is today. The series traverses themes of love, power, money, corruption, the ghosts of empire, the history of China, opium and opioids, the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, and the history of Artificial Intelligence and surveillance. The series deals with the rise of individualism and populism throughout history, and the failures of a wide range of resistance movements throughout time and various countries, pointing to how revolution has been subsumed in various ways by spectacle and culture, because of the way power has been forgotten or given away.
Since the late 1980s, BBC news crews have filmed all across the Soviet Union and Russia, but only a tiny portion of their footage was ever used for news reports. The rest was left unseen on tapes in Moscow. Filmmaker Adam Curtis obtains these tapes and uses them to chronicle the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of capitalist Russia and its oligarchs, and the effects of this on Russian people of all levels of society, leading to the rise to power of Vladimir Putin, and today's invasions of Ukraine. The films take you from inside the Kremlin, to the frozen mining cities in the Arctic circle, to tiny villages of the vast steppes of Russia, and the strange wars fought in the mountains and forests of the Caucasus.
Shifty
Shifty is a series of films that traverse the past 40 years in Britain, showing how the shift of political power to finance and hyper-individualism came together in powerful ways, to undermine one of the fundamental structures of mass democracy--the shared idea of what is real. As that fell apart, with it went the language and the ideas that people had turned to for the last 150 years to make sense of the world they lived in. As a result, life in Britain and the current and former colonies of its empire, has become strange--a hazy dream-like flux, where distrust in politicians keeps growing, and the political class seems to have lost control. Through archive footage, news reels, and on-screen-text in video essay format, Shifty documents the shapes of how this happened, using the vast ranges of footage to evoke what if felt like to live through an epic transformation during the 1980s.
From the Cold War to COVID, While the Rest of Us Die is an exploration of the history of the United States government's doomsday plans, called the Continuity of Government (COG). The series explores various national security spending on hidden underground cities, a secret air force, and several layered structural plans to suspend various democratic systems in order to serve the interests of the elite class--all without the knowledge of the public. It's origins stretch back to the 1950s with the prospect of nuclear strikes during the Cold War, but have secretly and significantly expanded in the proceeding decades.
52:43Caught in the Crackdown is a comprehensive documentary tracking the violence, protests, and arrests stemming from the 'federal immigration sweeps' currently occurring across the United States. The film examines the tactics, legal cases, and impact of these operations, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Minneapolis, presenting a multitude of cases of excessive use of force, illegal operations, and dangerous and excessive use of police weapons and tactics.
The Long War provides a historical context to how the United States and Israel have escalated a long conflict in the Middle East, through targeted assassinations, bombings, covert operations, propaganda campaigns, and arming and funding various terrorist organisations that have switched allegiances since the Cold War, or have transformed into other political alliances throughout the United States' so-called War on Terror.
1:29:49Through the voices of survivors, journalists, and excerpts of legal depositions, Diabolical dips its toes into the world of the Epstein Files--a partially released collection of millions of documents, images, videos, e-mails, and other records pertaining to criminal investigations undertaken by the FBI of convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The records were reluctantly released after much political pressure, and millions of files are still yet to be made public. Many of the world's billionaires, and most powerful figures in politics and mainstream culture appear in the files, as persons in the orbit of Epstein and his life trafficking teenage girls for sex. The film lays bare how the rich evade the legal and justice system with their wealth and power, and raises some conspiratorial questions about just who Epstein was, along with his connection to power and influence in the United States.
Epstein's Shadow is a short series that investigates the powerful, connected, and mysterious Ghislaine Maxwell, who was once the heiress to the media proprietor Robert Maxwell's fortune, but whose life takes a sordid turn after when her father dies and she meets Jeffrey Epstein, the serial sex offender. The series reveal a complicated story of power, sex, money, and corruption, which leads to Ghislaine Maxwell's arrest, and mounds of destruction in her wake, and that of Epstein and his co-conspirators.