1:15:01Filmed over three years in the war-zone of northern Uganda, Children of War follows a group of former child soldiers as they escape the battlefield, enter a rehabilitation centre, and undergo a process of trauma recovery and emotional healing. Having been abducted from their homes and schools, and forced to become fighters by the Lord's Resistance Army--a militia led by self-proclaimed prophet and warlord Joseph Kony--the children struggle to confront and break through years of captivity, extreme religious indoctrination, and participation in war crimes with the help of a team of trauma counsellors. As fearless allies guide the children into new lives, Children of War illuminates a powerful and cathartic story of forgiveness and hope in the aftermath of horrific war.
1:31:07What Would Jesus Buy is an examination of consumerism with a specific focus on Christmas in America. The film follows culture jamming outfit 'Reverend Billy' from the Church of Stop Shopping and the gospel choir which embark on a cross-country mission to "save Christmas from the Shopocalypse". Also discussed on the way are related issues such as the role sweatshops play in America's 'Big-Box' shopping culture. From the humble beginnings of preaching at his portable pulpit on New York City subways, to having a 'congregation' of thousands, Bill Talen (Rev. Billy) has inspired not just a 'church', but a national culture jamming movement...
1:31:37Hundreds of thousands of mobile phones, LCD screens, TVs, notebooks, tablets, and computers become useless or quickly "out-of-date" and end up in Ghana every year, where children and adolescents dismantle them for "recycling." Welcome to Sodom profiles the life of those who work in the brutal conditions, handling the world's electronic waste, and what they endure to barely make enough money to survive. Many years before the wasteland, Ghana was a beautiful savanna with greenery and animals, now it's a hell of fire, toxins, acrid smoke, plastic, and pollution, at the behest of the global economy and the technoculture that drives it.
45:11Demand investigates the commercial sex trade, across four countries: The United States, Netherlands, Japan, and Jamaica. The film reveals a harrowing first-hand account of the impact of soaring consumer demand for vulnerable women and children, to be victimised in sex trafficking markets. By exploring the entrenched connections of pornography, to widespread sexual assault, to a pervasive globalised human trafficking market, Demand questions the conditions that keep the inertia of the commercial sex trade roaring across the globe...
9:31Who Pays the Price -- The Human Cost of Electronics is a short film that seeks to humanise the largely hidden and anonymous global labour force that enables the ubiquitous technoculture, documenting the harsh conditions in which electronics are made and how this really impacts those people's lives, and the environment. Toxic chemicals, plastics, and sweat-shop working conditions all contribute to the global machine that disseminates digital technologies, hidden in plain sight. Through direct footage of factory workers, interviews with them and analysis of the conditions, Who Pays the Price asks the question of the viewer, and as a call to action to stop the exploitation and toxification of people and the natural world.
46:31The Dark Side Of Chocolate follows a team of investigative reporters into Africa where human trafficking and child labour fuel the chocolate industry worldwide. The film travels to Mali where hidden footage reveals the trafficking of small children to the cocoa fields in the neighbouring Ivory Coast and elsewhere. What is happening behind the sweet imagery of the chocolate industry?
25:01In November 2012, yet another incident at a textiles factory in Bangladesh killed at least 112 people. Walmart’s brand shorts were among the clothing found in the charred remains. Walmart blamed its supplier, saying the order had been sub-contracted without its permission. With this example among the many, Made in Bangladesh illustrates the complex organisation of corporate obfuscation--the industries that continue to drive sweat shops, slave labour and child labour under a very clever hall of mirrors...
Plutocracy: Political Repression in the United States is a series of films that comprehensively examine early North American history through the lens of class, to enable a wider critique of the social order in contemporary United States. The series not only documents and exemplifies individual strikes and labour movements throughout the centuries, but also serves to connect the narratives and political lessons of an entire era from a working-class viewpoint, forming a solid base of analysis for class struggle.
51:06Inside Burma -- The Land Of Fear exposes the history and brutality of one of the world's most repressive regimes. Nearly the size of Texas, with a population of more than 40 million, Burma has rich natural resources. Yet Burma is also a secret country. Isolated for the past 40 years, since a brutal military dictatorship seized power in Rangoon, Burma has been relegated to one of the world's poorest countries, with the assault on its people all but forgotten by the rest of the world. Award winning film-makers John Pilger and David Munro go undercover to expose how the former British colony is ruled by a harsh, bloody and uncompromising military regime...
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?
2:08:13Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine is not just another celebratory biographical film about the life of a business man that many around the world grieved in 2011. It's a full rounded critical examination into the fundamentals of a person revered as an iconoclast, a barbed-tongued tyrant, a business sociopath. The real Steve Jobs is revealed like this through candid interviews from those who had close relationships with him at different stages of his life, including the mother of his child, Lisa, that Jobs refused he had, but named a computer after instead. The film also takes us through the evocative essence of the brand of Apple Computers which has captured the population like zombies, and asks the question: What is the legacy of this industry, and the truth of this kind of person that the culture celebrates so much, completely ignoring the darkness?
52:34In 1979, the people of Nicaragua successfully put an end to decades of the corrupt Somoza dictatorship whose family had been in power for more than 40 years, put there by the United States marines. Four years later, this film travels to Nicaragua to question: How can a country survive when its jungle borders hold 4000 hostile troops?
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.
1:31:49The True Cost is a global investigation into the clothes we wear, the people who make them, and the impact the industry is having on the world. The price of clothing has been decreasing for decades, while the human and environmental costs have grown catastrophically. The True Cost pulls back the curtain on the untold story and asks us to consider, who really pays the price for our clothing?
1:45:01The End of Poverty? traces the growth of global poverty back to colonisation in the 15th century to reveal why it's not an accident or simple bad luck that there is a growing underclass around the world. Featuring interviews with a number of economists, sociologists, and historians, the film details how poverty is the clear consequence of free-market economic policy which has allowed powerful nations to exploit poorer ones for their assets, turning the money back to the hands of the concentrated few. This also follows on to how wealthy nations--especially the United States--thereby exert massive debts, seize a much disproportionate exploit of the natural world, and how this deep imbalance has dire consequences on the environment and on people...
42:25Fashion Victims looks at the real cost of cheap clothes from the conditions of sweat shops in Bangladesh. On 24th April, 2013 more than a thousand people were killed when an eight storey building collapsed in the heart of Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka. The collapse of Rana Plaza turned the world's attention to the shocking conditions workers in the country's clothing industry are forced to endure. In recent years, Australian companies have flooded into Bangladesh to take advantage of lax labour laws and the lowest wages in the world, paid to the predominantly young, female workers in the factories.
2:24:03Did 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?
Trafficked is a set of two films that follow a former-police officer's quest to find the man who enslaved a young Thai girl in a Sydney brothel. The series explores the trafficking of women and children for prostitution as a global problem. The United Nations estimates that more than one million children are forced into sexual slavery each year. Some of them are trafficked into Australia.
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...
1:23:16This film makes use of court documents, diplomatic cables and testimony by business figures themselves, as one case of many, in which corporations and indeed governments side with warlords, as good for business, in the endless pursuit of profit. The story revolves around the civil war of Liberia in the 1990s, with the seeds for exploitation and destruction having been planted a century before by the United States, when formally enslaved peoples in Liberia in-turn set up a society of racism, greed and exploitation, exacerbated by western economic powers. Years later, with the presence of Firestone corporation coming to Liberia to exploit vast plantations of rubber for control over the 'market,' the company unfolds as a considerable catalyst for systemic terror, being the forefront for pushing for profits at all costs amongst a brutal civil war; colluding with warlords and corrupt governments in pursuit of this ruthless end. Unfurling as a case study in these methods, this film documents the case that is not so unique but a story amongst many—particularly throughout the so-called third-world—where corporate might and globalisation have extreme consequences...
53:54The myths of globalisation have been incorporated into much of our everyday language. "Thinking globally" and "the global economy" are part of a jargon that assumes we are all part of one big global village, where national borders and national identities no longer matter. But what is globalisation? And where is this global village? In some respects you are already living in it. The clothes in your local store were probably stitched together in the factories of Asia. Much of the food in your local supermarket will have been grown in Africa...
57:15Servant or Slave follows the lives of five Aboriginal women who were stolen from their families and forced into indentured labour to be domestic "servants" for white people during the late 1890s and into 1900s in Australia. With the government exercising complete control over their wages and livelihood, many thousands of Aboriginal children were condemned to a treadmill of abuse, battery, rape, and slavery, only to discover that even today they've had to fight for recognition, respect and reparation for their treatment in the past. This film recounts their experiences, as a portrait of courage, strength and the fortitude to pursue justice for the crimes committed against them.
24:55China's factories provide low cost products such as computers and cars to the rest of the world, but the real cost is high with heavy air pollution, contaminated waterways, decimated land, terrible working conditions, widespread cancer and incidences of deaths. China's Dirty Secrets travels across the country to follow workers at factories that assemble computers, then to e-waste dumps, and finally an industrial incinerator burning medical waste, all showing first-hand the extensive environmental impacts of so-called "economic growth."
1:44:45Made over five years, with contributions from hundreds of women and over 200 Australian films, For Love or Money is a pictorial account of women's history in Australia over the past decades. The film chronicles the cycles of women's gains and losses as they are moved in and out of the workforce according to demands of the age, revealing how women's unpaid and voluntary work over the years has kept and continues to keep an entire system running smoothly, both in peacetime and in war. In this culture, women do the work that is never paid or still not even recognised as real work. This film shows how this system determines the kinds of jobs women do in the paid workforce--the low-paid, low-status jobs--and how women have fought and organised for equality and wage justice for over a century. For Love or Money remains relevant today as women continue the unfinished campaigns for equal pay, maternity leave and childcare, and still carry the major responsibility for caring and nurturing in the culture of individualism.
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...
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.
Corporations On Trial is a five-part series following just some of the many lawsuits being brought against multinational corporations for war crimes, conspiracy, corruption, assassinations, environmental devastation and payments to terrorists. Such serious charges have forced some of the world's largest companies to hire high-profile defence lawyers to protect public relations in cases often brought by plaintiffs who are barely literate. These five films reveal a growing anxiety about the power and influence of big business, as many multinational corporations have annual revenues greater than some countries' national budgets and indeed increasingly hold governments to ransom by their economic power. Around the world, ordinary people are fighting back and asking how many more times their interests should be sacrificed for corporate greed and shareholder profit...
51:58Globalisation has gone to great lengths to coerce many countries around the world to open 'free trade zones' for Western markets, where businesses receive special tax benefits and other rewards for operating factories and exploiting cheap labour. The argument, as is always cited, is for growth of the global economy. Free Trade Slaves sets out to examine these ideas by looking at the realities of such practice. Told from the perspective of the workers in Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Mexico and Morocco; the film exposes systemic human rights abuses, harrowing environmental destruction, birth defects and other long lasting health problems and social issues. The filmmakers suggest that workers around the world need to assert the right to unionise and organise together to demand and retain decent conditions, and that consumers should do their part by boycotting companies that continue to abuse people and the environment.