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?
1:28:04The Devil We Know investigates the toxicity of perfluorooctanoic acid--PFOA/PFA, also known as C8--the key ingredient found in non-stick cookware, stain resistant furniture and carpets, wrinkle free and water repellent clothing, cosmetics, lubricants, paint, pizza boxes, popcorn bags, and many other everyday products. The film centres on Parkersburg, West Virginia, in the United States, at the DuPont facility that manufactured Teflon, and dumped at least 1.7 million pounds of PFOA into rivers and streams between 1951 and 2003, knowing that it was a carcinogen. The film follows the personal stories of several people who worked at the facility that experienced cancers and birth defects, and also reveals the detection of PFOA in the blood of more than 98% of the general US population in the low and sub-parts per billion (ppb) range, with levels much higher in chemical plant employees and surrounding subpopulations.
1:36:19The Idiot Cycle investigates six major chemical companies—Dow Chemical, BASF, Bayer, Dupont, Astrazeneca and Monsanto—that are not only responsible for producing decades of cancer causing chemicals and pollution all across the globe, but also profit extensively from controlling cancer treatments and the production of drugs for those treatments. The irony is palpable. Also examined is how these very same companies own the most patents on genetically modified foods that have also never been tested for long-term health impacts like cancer. When there's dioxin in every mother's breast-milk, rivers throughout the world that no longer support life, cataclysmic environmental damage from industry and manufacturing—when do we say enough is enough?
1:20:54The Planet is a stylised observational video commentary that brings together an overview of the many global changes set about by industrial civilisation. Viewed through the myriad connections between consumerism and the false notion of a perpetually expanding economy on a finite planet, the film peers across the globe to reveal systemic exploitation; species extinction driven by industrial agriculture, logging, mining, manufacturing, pollution, the age of oil and plastic, etc; climate change; carrying capacity and population growth; while also positing that we—as in you and me—can do something, anything, to stop the destruction.
1:51:02By the close of the Industrial Revolution, the food supply in the United States was tainted with frauds, fakes, and legions of new and untested chemicals, dangerously threatening the health of the public. The Poison Squad, based on the book by the same name from author Deborah Blum, tells the story of Dr. Harvey Wiley, a government chemist who was determined to banish these dangerous substances from dinner tables, and so took on powerful food manufacturers and their allies. Wiley embarked upon a series of bold and controversial trials on 12 human subjects who would become known as the “Poison Squad.” Following Wiley’s unusual experiments and tireless advocacy, the film charts the path of the forgotten heroes who together laid the groundwork for consumer protection laws in the United States, and ultimately, paved the way for the creation of the Food and Drug Administration.
44:11Barbie, H&M jeans, everyday corn--just some of the products recalled due to controls on the use of dangerous chemicals as a wave of legal cases over toxicity is calling manufacturing of certain products into question. The Toxins Return follows the trail from field worker, to customs, to the high street shopper--how much can we trust all these products?
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...
48:01Once advertised as the birthplace of a bright new future for the American Dream, Salton City, California is now crumbling into an apocalyptic landscape of pollution and desolate land. As farmers burn their fields, and the honey bee population dwindles, scum floats down the most polluted river in North America, which carries raw sewage, pesticides and factory waste from Mexico into the once-beautiful Salton Sea. Toxic Imperial Valley travels through these landscapes, meeting the squatters and other occupiers left, in what looks like the end of the world...
1:36:16Trashed sets out to discover the extent and effects of garbage on the natural world. The film travels to beautiful destinations now tainted by pollution, through conversations with scientists, politicians, and people whose health and livelihoods have been fundamentally effected by waste. We see unfettered garbage dumping in Lebanon effecting its own coastline, but also the entire Mediterranean sea; toxic waste mounds set near a school and a future hospital in England; garbage incinerators in Iceland and Japan; the effects of plastic, microplastics, chemical sludge, flame retardants, pesticides, herbicides, dioxins, and other chemicals from waste and their synergistic impacts the world over. Trashed is a call for urgent action to resolve the issue of existing waste, to drastically reduce consumption and output to significantly less harmful levels, while demonstrating how this is already being reached for in many communities around the world.
1:27:51Bees have been mysteriously disappearing, literally vanishing from their hives. Known as 'Colony Collapse', the phenomenon has brought the commercial food industry to crisis. Commercial honeybee operations pollinate monocrops that make up one out of every three bites of food in the western world. Vanishing Of The Bees follows beekeepers David Hackenberg and Dave Mendes as they strive to keep their bees healthy and fulfil pollination contracts across the United States; examining the alarming disappearance of honeybees and the greater meaning it holds about the relationship between industrial culture and ecology...
56:45Vietnam: The Secret Agent is an investigation of the history, effects, and implications of the deadly compound "2,4,5-T," a main ingredient of the chemical weapon code-named Agent Orange, which the United States sprayed throughout Vietnam during 1961 to 1971. Its toxicological effects are still seen today, generations later: cancers, birth defects, physical deformities, deaths, contaminated soil in which dioxins bio-accumulate and concentrate in the food cycle. The chemical started as a herbicide in agriculture from the 1940s to 1970s, but was the first to be used in war, to similar effect. The film focuses on the exposure of these toxins to both citizens and soldiers alike, exposed through the lens of archival and battle-field footage, in support of interviews with veterans, scientists, attorneys and representatives of Dow Chemical--the company that made the chemical weapons--and the United States government, that used them against the world.
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.
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.
27:01Ever since three reactors went into meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011; a broad, disparate, anti-nuclear movement is growing in Japan. Nowhere is that more apparent, perhaps, than in Fukushima prefecture, where a group of local women boldly protest the deafening silence of the Japanese government over the worst nuclear accident of this century. Largely ignored by their own media, these brave women brush aside cultural shyness and share their honest views on the state of the cleanup, the cover-ups, the untruths and the stagnant political climate in today’s Japan...