1:23:21Amidst the supposed growing prosperity of India, there remains a dark underbelly of poverty. Born Into Brothels chronicles this through the lens of Kolkata's red light district where film-maker Zana Briski inspires a group of children of the prostitutes of the area to photograph the most reluctant subjects of it. As the kids excel in their new found art, will this help them have a chance for a better life away from the miserable poverty that threatens to crush their dreams?
45:35The filmmaker questions her sister, herself and others about the dreams and hopes they had growing up as girls in contrast to the reality they now face as women. Interviewees include a former Miss California contestant, a judge, a banker, an electrician, a secretary, and adolescent girls. They talk about childhood, athletics, careers, motherhood, body image, sexual assault and self-esteem. Made nearly 30 years ago, this film documents a growing awareness of issues affecting women. But have things changed today?
56:53Once relegated to the margins of society, pornography is now the most pervasive and visible aspect of popular culture, assuming an unprecedented role in media as its content becomes more harsh and extreme, racist and abusive. This eye-opening and disturbing film moves beyond frivolous "liberal versus conservative" debate and tackles the real issues surrounding pornography by placing the voices of performers themselves, producers and critics directly alongside the observations of women and men as they candidly discuss the role porn has played in shaping their sexual imaginations and relationships. The Price Of Pleasure reveals a nuanced portrait of how pleasure and pain, commerce and power, freedom and responsibility have become extremely twisted by popular culture, usurping the most intimate area of our lives.
32:15At the turn of the millennium, a group of eleven girls aged 8 to 16 from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds were interviewed about their views on media culture and its impact on their lives. Their insightful and provocative responses reveal how the attitudes and expectations of young girls are influenced by a saturated media culture. Using excerpts culled from a typical week of television broadcasting alongside the interviews, What a Girl Wants aims to provoke debate about the effects of media culture and, ideally, act as a catalyst for change in media content.
16:41Using undercover filming, Sex and Survival in Madagascar exposes the booming child sex trade of the 21st Century. In the hub of Madagascar, one of the world's poorest countries, prostitution is rampant and seen as an unavoidable means of survival. The film shows the complicity and complacency of authorities that do not act to stop this terror, and so the acts of resistance against sex slavery are carried out by the children themselves.
51:27Based on interviews conducted with hundreds of young women, Flirting With Danger examines how the wider culture's frequently contradictory messages about pleasure, danger, agency, and victimisation enter into women's most intimate relationships. The result is a candid and nuanced look at how women are forced to grapple with deeply ambivalent cultural attitudes about sexuality and relationships. These interviews are essential viewing for tackling the problematic issues surrounding consent, coercion and sexual violence throughout the culture.
56:39Sex Slaves documents an extraordinary journey deep into the world of sex trafficking from the perspective of Viorel--a young man trying to find his wife Katia who was four months' pregnant when she left home looking for a job. Along the way, the production team takes a rare, hidden-camera look at various traffickers, pimps and middlemen who buy and sell hundreds of thousands of women each year. Lured by traffickers who prey on their dreams of employment abroad, many of the women are then kidnapped and "exported" to Europe, the Middle East, the United States and elsewhere. During this process, they are sold to pimps, locked in brothels, drugged, terrorised and raped repeatedly. In Eastern Europe, sex trafficking has become the fastest growing form of organised crime, with Moldova and Ukraine widely seen as major suppliers of women into the global sex trade...
49:38The 'MeToo' movement has brought the pervasiveness of sexual abuse and harassment in this culture to the mainstream, creating an unprecedented demand for sexual violence prevention models that actually work. The Bystander Moment tells the story of one of the most prominent and proven of these models developed by activist and writer Jackson Katz and his colleagues. Illustrated through archival footage and clips from news, sports, and entertainment media, Katz explores the role of bystanders--especially friends, teammates, classmates, and co-workers--in perpetuating sexual harassment and sexual assault. Katz also gives attention to peer culture dynamics--in particular the male peer culture dynamics across race and ethnicity--that help normalise sexism and misogyny while silencing other men in the face of abuse. The Bystander Moment qualifies the crucial importance of appealing to people not as potential perpetrators or passive spectators, but as active bystanders and allies who have a positive role to play in challenging and changing sexist cultural norms, to stopping abuse and violence.
1:27:14During a ten-hour period in January 1995, Annabel Chong had sex with 251 men in front of cameras. The event was a world record and the resulting video sold more than 40,000 copies, starting a trend of record-breaking gang-bang pornography. Chong states that she intended for this act to "challenge the notion of women as passive sex objects," and added, "I wanted to take on the role of the stud. The more [partners], the better." Sex: The Annabel Chong Story revisits the story of that day and connects it to Chong's life as a student and as the daughter of a middle-class Chinese couple in Singapore. She talks about her decisions, and the film also follows her to an AIDS test after the world-record-setting recording where she also self-harmed and was never paid the $10,000 she was promised. The film closes on route home to Singapore, where Chong visits her parents who do not know about her dealings with the porn world, while friends and professors do. Should she tell her mother?
59:40Generation M looks at misogyny and sexism in mainstream media, exploring how negative definitions of femininity and hateful attitudes toward women get constructed and perpetuated throughout popular culture. The film tracks this across a broad and disturbing range of media phenomena: from the hyper-sexualization of commercial products aimed at girls, to the explosion of violence against women in video games aimed at boys; from the hysterical sexist rants of popular hip-hop artists and talk-radio shock-jocks, to the continually harsh, patronizing caricature of women found in virtually every area of media. Generation M posits the consequences of misogyny in all of its forms, showing that when we devalue more than half the population based on gender, we harm everyone—boys and men, women and girls alike.
1;22:41As an exposé of human trafficking, Very Young Girls follows a group of adolescent African-American girls who were seduced, abused and sold on New York's streets by pimps, having survived the life to share their story. Each recount their experiences, captured alongside startling footage shot by the brazen pimps themselves, giving a rare glimpse into how the cycle of street life begins for many women. Following the work of Rachel Lloyd and the journey each go through to exit their life on the streets, Very Young Girls portrays first-hand the occurrences of human trafficking throughout the United States.
1:28:30At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal reveals a dangerous athletic culture that prioritised winning over everything else, including protecting young female athletes. For more than 30 years, Larry Nassar worked with gymnasts, as a respected trainer and doctor. He was charming, taught at church, volunteered in the community, and was seemingly well-liked throughout. He treated girls' aches and pains, becoming a friend and confidant to many along the way, while also sexually abusing them during sessions for many years. When some girls began to speak up about their experiences, they were silenced, gaslighted or denied, all the way up to the highest levels of management, across multiple sporting institutions. After many complaints and eventually a cumulative legal investigation, Nassar ends up exposed as a serial sex offender. This film unpacks the scandal, its cover-up, and aftermath, through interviews with dozens of survivors, as well as coaches, lawyers and journalists, as one of the most high-profile paedophile trials in recent years. It documents the grooming, methods, and psychology of a charismatic sexual abuser, as well as the culture that enables and perpetuates it.
1:17:19Girl Model offers a glimpse into the hall of mirrors that is the modelling world as it interfaces with other industries and other countries. The film follows Ashley—a deeply ambivalent former-model who is now a scout and scours the Siberian countryside looking for 'fresh faces' to send to the Japanese market; and one of her 'discoveries,' Nadya, a thirteen year-old plucked from the Siberian countryside and dropped into the centre of Tokyo with promises of a profitable career. What entails is the opening of a can of worms that isn't easily solved in one sitting—a thriving and curiously sinister modelling industry that spans the globe, luring everywhere with pretences of wonder, success and riches. But the realities are harsh. The fashion industry can look glamorous from the outside, but its insides are, at the very least, deceptive and sinister; and the myths run deeply entrenched in the culture, constantly promulgating new, young recruits. This 'meat market,' a prelude to sex trafficking, is creepy, ugly, and preys on the young and vulnerable. Can the spell be broken?
26:41Moving Beyond Myth focuses on the sexual dilemmas and difficult life choices young girls face as they come of age in contemporary American culture. Challenging long-held myths about girlhood, the film draws on the insights of girls themselves to explore and shed light on their actual lived experience as they navigate an increasingly hyper-sexualized society. The voices of a diverse range of girls are supplemented with accessible analysis from leading experts on sexuality and society.
1:59:25In a visual exploration of institutionalised prostitution, Whores' Glory travels the globe to show how these people really live and work today, across three economically divergent countries. In Bangkok, Thailand, women punch a clock and wait for clients inside a brightly-lit glass box. In the red-light district of Faridpur, Bangladesh, a madam trafficker haggles over the price of a teenage girl. On the border town of Reynosa, Mexico, crack-addictions run high while women pray to 'Lady Death.' Whores' Glory is a unobscured look at the realities of sex-trafficking today and the industry that continues to spawns it and keep it alive.
As one half of the satirical duo, The Rubber Bandits, Blindboy is renown for wearing a plastic bag on his head while dishing out sharp social commentary. In this series, using his unique mix of irreverent commentary, a band of undercover reporters, and playful humour, Blindboy sets out to investigate some of the most important issues of our time.
31:44With its tropical beaches and buzzing nightlife, the island of Koh Samui in the Gulf of Thailand attracts many hundreds of thousands of tourists each year. The island is renowned in the West for sex tourism, and every year many male tourists form relationships with women working in the bars of Koh Samui. But how does this work? And what dynamics are at play? Love Me Long Time is a film that speaks to the men that travel back and forth to Thailand for these holiday romances that are for sale in a country ravaged by the oppression of the west, human trafficking and prostitution driven by poverty. Do these men know what they're doing?
45:40The Purity Myth takes a look at the resurgence of a movement of abstinence, brought about by a powerful alliance of religious ideologues, right-wing politicians, conservative media pundits and policy intellectuals who have been exploiting irrational fears about women's sexuality. From daddy-daughter "purity balls," taxpayer-funded abstinence-only curricula, and political attacks on 'Planned Parenthood,' to recent attempts by legislators to de-fund women's reproductive healthcare and narrow the legal definition of rape, The Purity Myth identifies the single false assumption underlying this huge push: that the worth of a woman depends on what she does—or does not do—sexually. This film also argues that the health and well-being of women is too important to be left to figureheads bent on vilifying feminism and undermining women's autonomy.
1:12:37Arguing that advertising not only sells things, but also ideas about the world, The Codes of Gender examines the commercial culture's inability to let go of reactionary gender representations. Presenter Sut Jhally's starting point is the breakthrough work of the late sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life prefigured the growing field of performance studies. Jhally applies Goffman's analysis of the body in print advertising to hundreds of print ads today, uncovering an astonishing pattern of regressive and destructive gender codes. By looking beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that tend to focus on either biology or objectification, The Codes of Gender offers important insights into the social construction of masculinity and femininity, the relationship between gender and power, and the everyday performance of cultural norms.
Misogyny is rampant in this culture, and corporations capitalise on making women hate their bodies. Indeed all aspects of womanhood are commodified, hypersexualised, and squeezed into gender stereotypes. Being female comes at a cost. So it's no wonder that young people growing up can feel horrible about themselves and their bodies, and further feel confused about what it means to be a woman in today's world. Into this perfect storm steps queer theory, an ideology born in the 1990s, that tells people that all the confusing feelings they may experience about the world they live in can be fixed not by changing the world, but by changing themselves. The past decade has seen a steep rise in the number of young girls seeking to alter their bodies by undergoing life threatening, irreversible procedures. Dysphoric is a series that explores this concept of gender transition, told through the voices of clinicians, psychiatrists, sociologists, feminists, academics, detransitioners, and concerned citizens and parents. The series also discusses the permanent medical side-effects of hormones and surgeries, the propaganda of corporations that glorify thousands of stereotypical gender presentations coalesced as fashion, the surge in pronoun policing, censorship and the curtailment of speech, language hijacking that calls women "menstruators," and the many other hurdles women face while trying to question this modern-day misogyny.
54:59The Virgin Trade investigates the growing phenomenon of Western sex tourism, with a focus on Thailand. The film travels through red light districts and the starry-eyed advertising propaganda that targets Western men to reveal the mechanics of the sex industry as it operates throughout Asia. What is revealed is a world entangled by money which leads to abuse, demand which perpetuates the culture, consumerism which drives demand, and poverty which drives the need. What happens when countries and cultures are ravished like this with Western sex tourism? Are parents selling their children into brothels to finance lavish Western lifestyles? Or do orphans fill the demand--smuggled into prostitution after disasters like the tsunami of 2004? The Virgin Trade dangles the questions of numbers while still affirming widespread exploitation and deceit. The interconnectedness, scale and depth of the problem, as well as what is still hidden or left unsaid, is left up to the viewer...
43:02Everybody who has survived adolescence knows what a scary, tumultuous, exciting time it is. But if we use memories of our experiences to guide our understanding of what today's girls are living through, we make a serious mistake. Girls are living in a new world. Reviving Ophelia is a call from Dr. Mary Pipher, a psychologist who has worked with teenagers for more than a decade. She finds that in spite of the women's movement, which has empowered adult women in some ways, teenage girls today are having a harder time than ever before because of higher levels of violence and sexism in the culture. The current crises of adolescence--frequent suicide attempts, dropping out of school and running away from home, teenage pregnancies in unprecedented numbers, and an epidemic of eating disorders--are caused not so much by "dysfunctional families" or incorrect messages from parents as by our media-saturated, image-obsessed culture.
35:26Sexy Inc. analyses the hyper-sexualisation of today's media environment and its noxious effects on young people. Psychologists, teachers and school nurses criticise the unhealthy culture surrounding our children, where marketing and advertising are targeting younger and younger audiences and bombarding them with sexual images...
46:31What do you get when you combine the culture of screens with the society of the spectacle, pervasive individualism with its rampant loneliness, in a media environment awash in a culture of pornography, instant gratification and self-interested sexual impetuousness? An insight into the question could be perhaps explained through The Secret World of Tinder. Tinder is an 'app' for 'smartphones' that displays profile pictures of people that are near the phone. When couples are matched, they can text each other. Many call it "the sex button" and the app indeed has a reputation in the world of online dating. This short TV documentary attempts to explore what it means in today's culture mediated by technology, as seen through the Tinder app, providing insights into the way some people think and feel about sex and relationships in the age of the technocracy.
To many in both business and government, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power is truly moved into the hands of the people. Certainly the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self tells the untold and controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society. How is the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interest?
1:04:33Filmmaker Denice Ann Evans draws heavily on the voices of students in this powerful exploration of hookup culture on college campuses. Supplementing the stories of students with analysis from health professionals and social commentary, the film's main concern is whether hookup culture is offering young people a new and potentially liberating set of sexual rules, or whether it's simply reinforcing traditional gender roles and blurring the line between consent and coercion. The result is a timely film that asks tough questions about the relationship between hookup culture, gender politics, and the alarming levels of sexual assault and binge drinking that continue to plague college campuses.
58:25Child Sex Trade USA travels through the United States to reveal the workings of a pervasive child sex trade, discovering that it is just as easy to 'buy a child' in the US as it is in Asia. 300,000 American children have been forced in to the sex industry, as of 2009, in the United States alone. This film presents a much needed analysis of the shocking cultural values that surround child abuse, paedophilia, human trafficking and prostitution; asking big questions of how, why, and what to do about it...
1:23:04An ex-pornstar, a 12 year old girl, and a 22 year old who yearns for the 'normal' genitals as seen in porn movies, are just some of whom are chronicled in Sexy Baby to draw together how the current relentless culture of pornography, social media and popular culture are deeply and profoundly affecting the lives women and girls. Based on intimate and candid conversations with kids in middle school classrooms, suburban shopping malls, nightclubs, college dorms, and high school house parties, the film chronicles trends among small town and big city kids--the pervasive culture affects everyone, everywhere. Most youngsters know someone who has emailed or texted a naked photo of themselves. Many kids have accidentally or intentionally had their first introduction to sex be via hardcore pornography online. Facebook has created an arena where kids compete to be "liked" and constantly worry about what image to portray. Much of what was once private is now made public. The list goes on. Sexy Baby is a powerful indictment of the Internet age and the hyper-sexualised culture affecting women and girls everywhere, as well as an insight into the struggle of parents navigating this new culture, wanting what is best for their kids and the generations to come.