"A global odyssey for peace"
Peter Watkins' global look at the impact of military use of nuclear technology and people's perception of it, as well as a meditation on the inherent bias of the media, and documentaries themselves.
Social & External
The people behind it
Peter Watkins
Narrator / Self
Francine Bastien
Self
Brian Mulroney
Mila Mulroney
Ronald Reagan
An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time.
Megacities is a documentary about the slums of four different metropolitan cities.
Santiago Mitre co-directs his first movement following The Student together with choreographer Onofri Barbato. Although it would have been more accurate to say “his first film-story-adventure-movie-great movie following The Student”, the word movement fits perfectly in Los posibles, the most overwhelmingly kinetic work Argentine cinema has delivered in many, many years. The film deals with the adaptation of a dance show directed by Onofri together with a group of teenagers who came to Casa La Salle, a center of social integration located in González Catán, trying to find some refuge from hardship. Already entitled Los posibles, the piece opened in the La Plata Tacec and was later staged in the AB Hall of the San Martín Cultural Center. Now, it dazzles audiences out of a film screen, with extraordinary muscles and a huge heart: Los posibles is a rhapsody of roughen bodies and torn emotions. Precise and exciting, it’s our own delayed, necessary, and incandescent West Side Story.
After the waning of the protests in Sanrizuka, Ogawa Pro started questioning the future of the collective and looking for other subjects to film. Following the method developed in the previous films, the filmmakers moved to the slum of Kotobuchi in the port city of Yokohama, where more than 6000 people were struggling to get by without any means of survival, exposed to industrial accidents and diseases. The result is one of the most moving films produced by the collective, a series of beautifully filmed portraits, voicing the silenced stories and songs of a group of people living in this community. Credit: ICA London
Found footage: California in the 1950's and 60's. A young Indian couple enjoys their personal American dream come true in their home somewhere in the suburbs of San Francisco. In great detail they pose with their newly achieved wealth in front of their Super-8 camera. Just like postcards, they would send these film rolls to their joint families back in India. Around the same time, an American missionary couple visits the city of Calcutta to shoot a Christian propaganda film. The drastic reality with poverty and famine in the streets of the Indian metropolis fits perfectly into their wicked plan: To promote the faith in Jesus by showing the misery that pagan believers are doomed to suffer from.
Life on the breadline in the 1930s was hard enough, but times were desperate when you fell beneath it. Hunger marches organised by the National Unemployed Workers' Movement drew attention to the cause, but this left-wing collective picked up a cine-camera. The fictional story at the heart of the film is somewhat melodramatic, but the authentic surroundings give its message realism and weight.
One billion people on our planet—one in six—live in shantytowns, slums or squats. Slums: Cities of Tomorrow challenges conventional thinking to propose that slums are in fact the solution, not the problem, to urban overcrowding caused by the massive migration of people to cities. (Lynne Fernie, HotDocs)
This documentary is a portrait of Point St. Charles, one of Montreal’s notoriously bleak neighbourhoods. Many of the residents are English-speaking and of Irish origin; many of them are also on welfare. Considered to be one of the toughest districts in all of Canada, Point St. Charles is poor in terms of community facilities, but still full of rich contrasts and high spirits – that is, most of the time.
MORENA tells the uplifting story of the Philippine National Surf Athlete Ikit Agudo, who overcame the pressure to blend into a society obsessed with skin whitening. Within the ocean, she found happiness, strength, and pride in her roots. Inspiring young girls around the world to embrace who they truly are. In the Philippines, skin-whitening remains a billion-peso industry, a legacy of colonial beauty ideals that for generations have led many to neglect their true identity and natural beauty.
Riles is a documentary about the life of a riles resident, Eddie, in a squatter area along the railroad tracks within the downtrodden section of Balic-balik, Manila.
In October 1957, one of the Windscale nuclear reactors caught fire. It was the world's first nuclear accident, attributed to the rush to build atomic weapons. This programme highlights the mistakes leading to a nuclear event which, 40 years on, still takes second place only to Chernobyl.
The story of unemployment in New Zealand and In A Land of Plenty is an exploration of just that; it takes as its starting point the consensus from The Depression onwards that Godzone economic policy should focus on achieving full employment, and explores how this was radically shifted by the 1984 Labour government. Director Alister Barry's perspective is clear, as he trains a humanist lens on ‘Rogernomics' to argue for the policy's negative effects on society, as a new poverty-stricken underclass developed.
The story of Shaista, a young man who—newly married to Benazir and living in a camp for displaced persons in Kabul—struggles to balance his dreams of being the first from his tribe to join the Afghan National Army with the responsibilities of starting a family. Even as Shaista’s love for Benazir is palpable, the choices he must make to build a life with her have profound consequences.
This film is a factual and chronological account of the events preceding the atomic bombing of Hiroshima during World War II and the significant effect of the atomic bomb on peacetime projects and events of the atomic age.
After claiming he served 20 years in a secret space program, Corey Goode became a UFO icon - then a lightning rod. This documentary follows his rise and the strange intersection of memory, myth, and media in the age of disclosure.
A former lawyer leaves everything behind to embark on the quest for a dinosaur-like animal supposedly living in Africa's unexplored forests.
Documentary about the foreign tourism in Rocinha, the biggest Latin America's favela, which receives about 3.000 foreign tourists per month. They come to Rocinha looking for the most varied aspects, from the poorness to the violence, from the geography to the architecture, from the viewing to the atmosphere, from the curiosity to the welfarism.
Documentary movie about testing of the largest nuclear weapon in history, the Tsar Bomba. Declassified and made available to the public in 2020.
A film about the noted American linguist/political dissident and his warning about corporate media's role in modern propaganda.
Taking inspiration from Peter M. Bracke's definitive book of the same name, this seven-hour documentary dives into the making of all twelve Friday the 13th films, with all-new interviews from the cast and the crew.
Oliver Stone charts the history of the United States from the Second World War to the present.
Live Aid was held on 13 July 1985, simultaneously in Wembley Stadium in London, England, and the John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, United States. It was one of the largest scale satellite link-ups and television broadcasts of all time: watched live by an estimated global audience of 1.9 billion, across 150 nations. "It's twelve noon in London, seven AM in Philadelphia, and around the world it's time for Live Aid...!"
A chronicle of the rise and fall of O.J. Simpson, whose high-profile murder trial exposed the extent of American racial tensions, revealing a fractured and divided nation.