We feed the world

Directed by Erwin Wagenhofer
Playing time: 96 min
Every day in Vienna the amount of unsold bread sent back to be disposed of is enough to supply Austria's second-largest city, Graz. Around 350,000 hectares of agricultural land, above all in Latin America, are dedicated to the cultivation of soybeans to feed Austria's livestock while one quarter of the local population starves. Every European eats ten kilograms a year of artificially irrigated greenhouse vegetables from southern Spain, with water shortages the result.

In WE FEED THE WORLD, Austrian filmmaker Erwin Wagenhofer traces the origins of the food we eat. His journey takes him to France, Spain, Romania, Switzerland, Brazil and back to Austria.

Leading us through the film is an interview with Jean Ziegler, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

WE FEED THE WORLD is a film about food and globalisation, fishermen and farmers, long-distance lorry drivers and high-powered corporate executives, the flow of goods and cash flow–a film about scarcity amid plenty. With its unforgettable images, the film provides insight into the production of our food and answers the question what world hunger has to do with us .

Interviewed are not only fishermen, farmers, agronomists, biologists and the UN's Jean Ziegler, but also the director of production at Pioneer, the world's largest seed company, as well as Peter Brabeck, Chairman and CEO of Nestlé International, the largest food company in the world.

English / Spanish version:

The Trap (Part 3)

Directed by Adam Curtis
Playing time: 60 min
The final program of Curtis' 2007 series focuses on the concepts of positive and negative liberty introduced in the 1950s by Isaiah Berlin. Curtis briefly explains how negative liberty could be defined as freedom from coercion and positive liberty as the opportunity to strive to fulfill one's potential. Tony Blair read Berlin's essays on the topic and wrote to him in the late 1990s, arguing that positive and negative liberty could be mutually compatible. He never received a reply, as Berlin was on his death bed.

The program begins with a description of the Two Concepts of Liberty, reviewing Berlin's opinion that, since it lacked coercion, negative liberty was the 'safer' of the two. Curtis then explains how many political groups who sought their vision of freedom ended up using violence to achieve it.

Curtis looks at the neo-conservative agenda of the 1980s which argued that violence would sometimes be necessary to achieve their goals, except they wished to spread what they described as democracy. Curtis argued, although the version of society espoused by the neo-conservatives made some concessions towards freedom, it did not offer true freedom.

The neo-conservatives took a strong line against the Sandinistas—a political group in Nicaragua—who Reagan argued were accepting help from the Soviets and posed a real threat to American security. The truth was that the Sandinistas posed no real military threat to the U.S., and a disinformation campaign was started against them painting them as accessories of the Soviets. The Contras, who were a proxy army fighting against the Sandinistas, were—according to U.S. propaganda—valiantly fighting against the evil of Communism. In reality, argues Curtis, they were using all manner of techniques, including the torture, rape and murder of civilians. Contras were known to use CIA planes for drug runnings and the CIA also helped fund the Contras by illegally selling arms to the Iranians. Reagan´s policies of promoting democracy did aust U.S. friendly dictators Augusto Pinochet and Ferdinand Marcos via elections.

However such policies did not always result in the achievement of neo-conservative aims and occasionally threw up genuine surprises. Curtis examined the Western-backed government of the Shah in Iran, and how the mixing of Sartre's positive libertarian ideals with Shia religious philosophy led to the revolution which overthrew it. Having previously been a meek philosophy of acceptance of the social order, in the minds of revolutionaries such as Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Khomeini, Revolutionary Shia Islam became a meaningful force to overthrow tyranny.

The program reviews the Blair government and its role in achieving its vision of a stable society. Curtis argues that the Blair government created the opposite of freedom, in that the type of liberty it had engendered wholly lacked any kind of meaning. Its military intervention in Iraq had provoked terrorist actions in the UK and these terrorist actions were in turn used to justify restrictions of liberty.

English version:

The Trap (Part 2)

Directed by Adam Curtis
Playing time: 60 min
The second episode reiterates many of the ideas of the first, but develops the theme that the drugs such as Prozac and lists of psychological symptoms which might indicate anxiety or depression were being used to normalize behavior and make humans behave more predictably, like machines. This was not presented as a conspiracy theory, but as a logical (although unpredicted) outcome of market-driven self-diagnosis by checklist, discussed in the previous program.

The program shows that people with standard mood fluctuations diagnose themselves as abnormal. They then present themselves at psychiatrist's offices, fulfilled the diagnostic criteria without offering personal histories, and were medicated. The alleged result was that vast numbers of Western people have had their behavior modified by SSRI drugs without any strict medical necessity.

Curtis explains how, with the "robotic" description of humankind apparently validated by geneticists, the game theory systems gained even more hold over society's engineers.

Game theory worked its way into civil service and the belief came about that those stating they are working in government to help public good should be fired as they must be lying. Only those who worked based on meeting targets with incentives should be rewarded. But people cheated the faulty system sometimes at the expense of safety of others as in the case of hospitals.

The program describes how the Clinton administration gave in to market theorists in the U.S. and how New Labour in the UK decided to measure and provide targets for everything it could including several things that are unmeasurable. This created a government that was sacrificing the greater good to appease immediate and often trivial desires of focus groups.

English version:

The Trap (Part 1)

Directed by Adam Curtis
Playing time: 60 min
In this episode, Curtis examines the rise of game theory used during the Cold War and the way in which its mathematical models of human behavior filtered into economic thought.

The program traces the development of game theory with particular reference to the work of John Nash (famous from "Beautiful Mind"), who believed that all humans were inherently suspicious and selfish creatures that strategized constantly. Using this as his first premise, Nash constructed logically consistent and mathematically verifiable models, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Economics. He invented system games reflecting his beliefs about human behavior, including one called "So Long Sucker---F*ck Your Buddy", in which the only way to win was to betray your playing partner, and it is from this game that the episode's title is taken. These games were internally coherent and worked correctly as long as the players obeyed the ground rules that they should behave selfishly and try to outwit their opponents, but when RAND's analysts tried the games on their own secretaries, they instead chose not to betray each other, but to cooperate every time. This did not, in the eyes of the analysts, discredit the models, but instead proved that the secretaries were unfit subjects.

What was not known at the time was that Nash was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and, as a result, was deeply suspicious of everyone around him—including his colleagues—and was convinced that many were involved in conspiracies against him. It was this mistaken belief that led to his view of people as a whole that formed the basis for his theories. Footage of an older and wiser Nash was shown in which he acknowledges that his paranoid views of other people at the time were false.

Curtis examines how game theory was used to create the USA's nuclear strategy during the Cold War. Because no nuclear war occurred, it was believed that game theory had been correct in dictating the creation and maintenance of a massive American nuclear arsenal—because the Soviet Union had not attacked America with its nuclear weapons, the supposed deterrent must have worked and the theories would later be propagated through other segments of society.

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La Hora de los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces)

Directed by Fernando E. Solanas

Playing time: 260 min
The liberation struggles of the 1960s were a fertile seedbed for La hora de los hornos. Independence movements in the colonies and neo-colonies of the Third World, student revolts in the United States and Western Europe, and the brief protest by Czechoslovakians against the dull grey bureaucracy of the Soviet Union were the world context in which Fernando E. Solanas and Octavio Getino's film exploded. Argentina moved closer to a social revolution than it ever had before (or since), and Hora was an important expression of that movement, as well as a pivotal example for cineastes involved in national liberation movements throughout the world.

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Spanish version:

Argentina, The take (La Toma)

Directed by Avis Lewis y Naomi Klein.
Playing time: 146 min
La película describe el proceso de recuperación de empresas en Argentina por parte de los trabajadores. Con voluntad "subversiva" y "de emocionar" gracias a "una historia humana" en los antípodas del reality show, Klein y Lewis pretenden que La toma dé "un giro de 180 grados al debate sobre la globalización". ¿Cómo? "Presentando alternativas" a una problemática, la de la fuga de capitales y la deslocalización de empresas, capaz de "arrasar un país fronterizo entre el primer y el tercer mundo como Argentina pero que amenaza por igual a Barcelona, Toronto y Caracas".
Lewis admite que se han ocupado fábricas en otros lugares y momentos de la historia, pero destaca del caso argentino "un énfasis nuevo en la democracia de base asamblearia" y el ejemplo de una lucha obrera que sustituye "la tradición de la huelga" por la "insistencia en el derecho y la necesidad de trabajar con dignidad".
Klein puntualiza: "Si en los años 70 la ocupación de fábricas fue fruto de una ideología que iba de la cabeza a los pies, hoy se ha invertido el proceso y la política nace y crece en acciones como la de ocupar no sólo una fábrica, sino una casa, un centro social o --tomados de internet-- un programa de software libre o una canción"

English & Spanish version:

Le monde selon monsanto

Implantée dans quarante-six pays, Monsanto est devenue le leader mondial des OGM, mais aussi l’une des entreprises les plus controversées de l’histoire industrielle. Depuis sa création en 1901, la firme a accumulé des procès en raison de la toxicité de ses produits, mais se présente aujourd’hui comme une entreprise des « sciences de la vie » convertie aux vertus du développement durable.

A partir de documents inédits, de témoignages de victimes, de scientifiques et d’hommes politiques, « Le monde selon Monsanto » reconstitue la genèse d’un empire industriel qui à grand renfort de mensonges, de collusion avec l’administration américaine, de pressions et de tentatives de corruption est devenu le premier semencier du monde, permettant l’extension planétaire des cultures OGM sans aucun contrôle sérieux de leurs effets sur la nature et la santé humaine !

French version:

Super rich: The greed game

Directed by Robert Peston.
Playing time: 58 min
As the credit crunch bites and a global economic crisis threatens, Robert Peston reveals how the super-rich have made their fortunes, and the rest of us are picking up the bill.

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Zeitgeist 2: Addendum

Directed by Peter Joseph
Playing time: 123 min
'Zeitgeist, The Movie' and 'Zeitgeist: Addendum' were created as Not-for-Profit expressions to communicate what the author felt were highly important social understandings which most humans are generally not aware of. The first film focuses on suppressed historical & modern information about currently dominant social institutions, while also exploring what could be in store for humanity if the power structures at large continue their patterns of self-interest, corruption, and consolidation.

The second film, Zeitgeist: Addendum, attempts to locate the root causes of this pervasive social corruption, while offering a solution. This solution is not based on politics, morality, laws, or any other "establishment" notions of human affairs, but rather on a modern, non-superstitious based understanding of what we are and how we align with nature, to which we are a part. The work advocates a new social system which is updated to present day knowledge, highly influenced by the life long work of Jacque Fresco and The Venus Project.

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Ring of Power

Directed by AmenStop Productions
Playing time: 144 min
From the mystery religions of ancient Egypt to the Zionist role in 9/11, "Ring Of Power" unrevises 4000 years of revisionist human history with never - before - seen revelations. "Ring Of Power" puzzles together the pieces of a giant puzzle into one BIG PICTURE documentary series. The Producer is an experienced, award winning documentary filmmaker who, as a child, learned that her father was a member of the secretive cult of Freemasonry. She recalls many arguments between her parents over her father's secret meetings and the exclusion of women from the brotherhood.
The Masonic ring that her father wore had been passed down from father to son over the generations. When she asked her father about the meaning of the letter "G" and the compass and square on his ring, she got no response. As an adult, she decided to investigate. That investigation grew into four years of intensive research into the identity and history of the diabolical globalists who she calls the "Ring Of Power". Their goal is one World Empire and one world ruler.

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The oil factor: Behind the war on terror

Directed by Free-Will Productions
Playing time: 89 min
After assessing today's dwindling oil reserves and skyrocketing use of oil for fuels, plastics and chemicals, "The Oil Factor" questions the motives for the U.S. wars in the Middle-East and Central Asia where 3/4 of the world's oil and natural gas is located. With exclusive footage shot on location in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the film documents the spiraling violence now engulfing both Iraq and Afghanistan, a country conspicuously absent from the commercial media's news segments. Interviews gathered throughout the Middle-East, Europe and the United States, including a Bechtel executive in Baghdad, also expose who is cashing in on the tens of billions of dollars requested from congress by the current administration of G. W. Bush.

With detailed maps and graphics, The Oil Factor features many experts and personalities such as former Defense Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, M.I.T. professor Noam Chomsky, the Project for the New American Century Executive Director Gary Schmitt, Coalition Provisional Authority Chairman Paul Bremer, former Pentagon analyst Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, current Iraqi government official Abdel Aziz Al-Hakim and authors Ahmed Rashid and Michael C. Ruppert.

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Memoria del saqueo

Directed by Fernando E. Solanas
Playing time: 120 min
Desde los comienzos de la dictadura militar, hace ya veinticinco años, Argentina y su pue-blo han tenido que hacer frente a una de las peores crisis económicas y sociales vividas ja-más por un país en período de paz. Argentina, un país que fue próspero, ha tenido que enfrentarse de forma perió-dica a todos y cada uno de los traumas estigmatizados por la mili-tancia anticapitalista: exorbitantes deudas nacionales, el desalma-do ultraliberalismo, la desenfrenada corrupción política y financiera y el expolio regular de los bienes públicos. Todo ello, con la ayuda de las compañías multinacionales occidentales y la complicidad de los organismos internacionales.
La política de la tierra abrasada, re-presentada por tipos como Carlos Menem, ha conducido al país a un increíble cataclismo de hambre, enfermedad y sacrificio de vidas humanas: un genocidio social.
"Memoria del saqueo" saca a relucir los mecanismos que han provocado esta catástrofe. Esta película está dedicada a todos aquellos que resisten con dignidad y coraje. Es inaceptable dejar que un pueblo vaya sumiéndose poco a poco en la pobreza. Pero todavía es más inaceptable dejar que la pobre-za se establezca, cuando dicho proceso ya se había vaticinado. Y lo que es peor aún, permitir que la pobreza se instale en una tierra tan rica en recursos.

Spanish version (Part 1):



Spanish version (Part 2): Here

End Game

Directed by Alex Jones
Playing time: 139 min
For the New World Order, a world government is just the beginning. Once in place they can engage their plan to exterminate 80% of the world's population, while enabling the "elites" to live forever with the aid of advanced technology. For the first time, crusading filmmaker Alex Jones reveals their secret plan for humanity's extermination: Operation ENDGAME.

Jones chronicles the history of the global elite's bloody rise to power and reveals how they have funded dictators and financed the bloodiest wars—creating order out of chaos to pave the way for the first true world empire.

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Spanish version:

The four world war

From the front-lines of conflicts in Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, Palestine, Korea, 'the North' from Seattle to Genova, and the 'War on Terror' in New York, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

It is the story of men and women around the world who resist being annihilated in this war

While our airwaves are crowded with talk of a new world war, narrated by generals and filmed from the noses of bombs, the human story of this global conflict remains untold. The Fourth World War brings together the images and voices of the war on the ground. It is a story of a war without end and of those who resist.

The product of over two years of filming on the inside of movements on five continents, The Fourth World War is a film that would have been unimaginable at any other moment in history. Directed by the makers of This Is What Democracy Looks Like and Zapatista, produced through a global network of independent media and activist groups, it is a truly global film from our global movement.

English version: Here
Spanish version: Here

The Corporation

Directed by Mark Achbar - Jennifer Abbott.
The film charts the development of the corporation as a legal entity from its origins as an institution chartered by governments to carry out specific public functions, to the rise of the vast modern institutions entitled to some of the legal rights of a person. One central theme of the documentary is an attempt to assess the "personality" of the corporate "person" by using diagnostic criteria from the DSM-IV; Robert Hare, a University of British Columbia Psychology Professor and FBI consultant, compares the profile of the modern, profit-driven corporation to that of a clinically-diagnosed psychopath. The film focuses mostly on corporations in North America, especially in the United States.

The film is composed of several vignettes examining and critiquing corporate practices, and drawing parallels between examples of corporate malfeasance and the DSM-IV's symptoms of psychopathy, i.e. callous unconcern for the feelings of others, incapacity to maintain enduring relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness (repeated lying to and deceiving of others for profit), incapacity to experience guilt, and failure to conform to the social norms with respect to lawful behaviors.

English version: Here
Spanish version: Here
French version: Here

The Yes Men

The Yes Men are a group of culture jamming activists who practice what they call "identity correction" by pretending to be powerful people and spokespersons for prominent organizations. They create and maintain fake websites similar to ones they want to spoof, and then they accept invitations received on their websites to appear at conferences, symposia, and TV shows. Their newfound, self-proclaimed authority to express the idea that corporations and governmental organizations often act in dehumanizing ways toward the public has met both positively and negatively with political overtones. Elaborate props are sometimes part of the ruse, as shown in their 2003 DVD release The Yes Men.

Their method is often satire: posing as corporate or government spokespeople, they might make shocking denigrating comments about workers and consumers, then point out what appears to be a lack of shock or anger in the response to their prank, with no one realizing the reactionary rhetoric was only a joke. Sometimes, the Yes Men's phony spokesperson makes announcements that represent dream scenarios for the anti-globalization movement or opponents of corporate crime. The result is false news reports of the demise of the WTO, or Dow paying for a Union Carbide cleanup.

The Yes Men have posed as spokespeople for The World Trade Organization, McDonald's, Dow Chemical, and the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. The two leading members of The Yes Men are known by a number of aliases, most recently, and in film, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno. Their real names are Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos, respectively. Servin is an author of experimental fiction, and was known for being the man who inserted images of men kissing in the computer game SimCopter. Vamos is an assistant professor of media arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York. They are assisted by numerous people across the globe.

English version: Here
Spanish version: Here

Life and Dept

Directed by Stephanie Black:
Life and Dept examines the economic and social situation in Jamaica, and specifically the impact thereon of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank's globalization policies. Its starting point is the award-winning non-fiction essay A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid.

Kathleen C. Fennessy's review of the documentary states:

“Set to a beguiling reggae beat, Life and Debt takes as its subject Jamaica's economic decline in the 20th century. The story has reverberations in the plight of other third-world nations blindsided by globalization, like Ghana and Haiti. After England granted Jamaica independence in 1962, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) stepped in with a series of loans.”

These loans were conditional on structural adjustment policies, which requiring Jamaica to enact economic reforms - trade liberalization, privatization, and deregulation. However, the reforms were unsuccessful and left the country with $4.6 billion dollars in debt. The film blames the IMF and the West for causing this situation.

The film features a number of interviews with former Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley in which he critiques the system of International Financial Institution loans. He is particularly critical of required structural adjustments as an attack on the sovereignty of many former colonial nations and suggests the system is akin to imperialism or neocolonialism. Similar claims have been made popular by former Chief Economist of the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz.

English version: Here

Spanish version: Here

Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers

Directed by Robert Greenwald:
A 2006 documentary about the ongoing Iraq War and the behavior of companies with no-bid contracts working within Iraq. The movie was made by Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films.

Specifically, the film claims four major contractors -- Blackwater, K.B.R.-Halliburton, CACI and Titan -- are over-billing the U.S. government and doing substandard work while endangering the lives of American soldiers and private citizens. The documentary contends these companies are composed of ex-military and ex-government workers who unethically help their companies get and keep enormous contracts and milk the American taxpayer.

The film crew interviews military servicemen, watchdog group affiliates, and former employees of Halliburton.

Halliburton contends the film is "yet another rehash of inaccurate, recycled information." During filming, Greenwald had requested interviews with the contractors, but they turned him down.

This was the first film to raise substantial production funds from small donations online: $267,892 from 3,000 people in 10 days.

English version: Here

Sicko

Directed by Michael Moore:
Michael Moore that investigates the American health care system, focusing on its health insurance and pharmaceutical industry. The film compares the for-profit, non-universal U.S. system with the non-profit Universal Health Care systems of Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Cuba.

Sicko opened to positive reviews, but also generated criticism and controversy. Some policy specialists have praised the film while others have criticized the film for its positive portrayal of the publicly funded health systems of Canada, the United Kingdom and Cuba, and for its negative portrayal of the health care system in the United States.

Sicko was made on a budget of approximately $9 million, and grossed $24.5 million theatrically in the United States. This box office result met the official expectation of The Weinstein Company, which hoped for a gross in line with Bowling for Columbine's $21.5 million US box office gross.

English version: Here

Bowling for Columbine

Directed by Michael Moore:
The film explores what Moore suggests are the causes for the Columbine High School massacre and other acts of violence with guns. Moore focuses on the background and environment in which the massacre took place and some common public opinions and assumptions about related issues. The film looks into the nature of violence in the United States.

In Moore's discussions with various people – including South Park co-creator Matt Stone, the National Rifle Association's then-president Charlton Heston, and musician Marilyn Manson – he seeks to explain why the Columbine massacre occurred and why the United States has a high violent crime rate (especially crimes involving guns), and promotes the fact that such crime in the U.S. is relatively higher than in other developed nations.

English version: Here