Steal This Film

06:46

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Part One


Part Two

In fighting file sharing, the entertainment industry is fighting the fundamental structure of the Internet. Steal This Film is a film series documenting the movement against intellectual property and was a talking point in the British Documentary Festival. Part One, produced in Sweden and released in 2006, takes account of the prominent players in the Swedish piracy culture: The Pirate Bay, Piratbyran, and the Pirate Party.

This film includes a critical analysis of an alleged regulatory capture performed by the Hollywood film industry to leverage economic sanctions by the United States government on Sweden through the WTO. Alleged aims included the application of pressure to Swedish police into conducting a search and seizure against Swedish law for the purpose of disrupting The Pirate Bay’s BitTorrent tracker.

The Truth According To Wikipedia

06:43

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Google or Wikipedia? Those of us who search online – and who doesn’t? – are getting referred more and more to Wikipedia. For the past two years, this free online “encyclopedia of the people” has been topping the lists of the world’s most popular websites. But do we really know what we’re using? Backlight plunges into the story behind Wikipedia and explores the wonderful world of Web 2.0. Is it a revolution, or pure hype? Director IJsbrand van Veelen goes looking for the truth behind Wikipedia. Only five people are employed by the company, and all its activities are financed by donations and subsidies. The online encyclopedia that everyone can contribute to and revise is now even bigger than the illustrious Encyclopedia Britannica.

Does this spell the end for traditional institutions of knowledge such as Britannica? And should we applaud this development as progress or mourn it as a loss? How reliable is Wikipedia? Do “the people” really hold the lease on wisdom? And since when do we believe that information should be free for all? In this film, “Wikipedians,” the folks who spend their days writing and editing articles, explain how the online encyclopedia works. In addition, the parties involved discuss Wikipedia’s ethics and quality of content. It quickly becomes clear that there are camps of both believers and critics.

Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies A People

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The Arab is a one-dimensional caricature, a cartoon cutout used by film makers as stock villains and as comic relief. And so, over and over, we see Arabs in movies portrayed as buffoons, their only purpose being to deliver cheap laughs. This groundbreaking documentary dissects a slanderous aspect of cinematic history that has run virtually unchallenged from the earliest days of silent film to today’s biggest Hollywood blockbusters. Featuring acclaimed author Dr. Jack Shaheen, the film explores a long line of degrading images of Arabs–from Bedouin bandits and submissive maidens to sinister sheikhs and gun-wielding “terrorists”–along the way offering devastating insights into the origin of these stereotypic images, their development at key points in US history, and why they matter so much today.

Shaheen shows how the persistence of these images over time has served to naturalize prejudicial attitudes toward Arabs and Arab culture, in the process reinforcing a narrow view of individual Arabs and the effects of specific US domestic and international policies on their lives. By inspiring critical thinking about the social, political, and basic human consequences of leaving these Hollywood caricatures unexamined, the film challenges viewers to recognize the urgent need for counter-narratives that do justice to the diversity and humanity of Arab people and the reality and richness of Arab history and culture.

Behind The Big News: Propaganda and the CFR

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The executives, the editors in print media, the senior producers, executive producers in the visual media – these are the people who have the ideological bias and what’s probably almost as important – their personal friendships. They go to the same country clubs, they go to the same dinners, they socialize with a lot of the people that they cover.The mainstream news media, while Americans rely on it daily for the latest reports on world and domestic events, a recent study conducted by the Cronkite School of Journalism indicates that nearly 67% of Americans don’t trust major media for accurate reporting.

Ask Americans specifically why they distrust the media and the answers are generally vague. After all, reports of news media abuses aren’t normally found on the front page or the nightly news. Nonetheless, they do exist. Today, standards in mainstream news reporting had more to do with career enhancement than reporting the truth.

Today the CFR maintains its’ goal is to “increase America’s understanding of the world.” However, the actual objective of this highly exclusive club is revealed by the rare admonitions of the insiders themselves. In the early 60’s, a Georgetown University Professor collects information for a book favorable to the network of powerful men who founded the CFR. For two years, Professor Carroll Quigley is allowed to examine the confidential papers and secret records of this network.

Quigley reveals that these men aim “to create a world system of financial control, in private hands, able to dominate the political system of each country, and the economy of the world as a whole.” In short, they seek total and quiet control of the entire world and the CFR is the most visible conduit for carrying out that agenda. (Excerpt from the film)

On Piracy And The Future Of Media

06:35

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Part 1


Part 2

Each day, millions of youths from Canada and around the world download music and movies off of the Internet. This epidemic of “unauthorized” downloading has been cited by the record and film industries as being the prime cause for billions in losses. Politicians have come under tremendous pressure to pass legislation on the issue. But despite all the media frenzy on the piracy crackdowns, there’s been very little attention to the topic itself.

At the very best, news reporters regurgitated the contents of an industry press release. There was nothing of substance, which is where this documentary fits in: we wanted to cover the issue in-depth. We interviewed industry execs, copyright lawyers, pirates, consumers, artists, and everyone we could think of – and made you this film

No Logo: Brands, Globalization & Resistance

06:33

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In the age of the brand, logos are everywhere. But why do some of the world’s best-known brands find themselves on the wrong end of the spray paint can — the targets of anti-corporate campaigns by activists and protesters?

No Logo, based on the best-selling book by Canadian journalist and activist Naomi Klein, reveals the reasons behind the backlash against the increasing economic and cultural reach of multinational companies. Analyzing how brands like Nike,The Gap, and Tommy Hilfiger became revered symbols worldwide, Klein argues that globalization is a process whereby corporations discovered that profits lay not in making products (outsourced to low-wage workers in developing countries), but in creating branded identities people adopt in their lifestyles.

Using hundreds of media examples, No Logo shows how the commercial takeover of public space, destruction of consumer choice, and replacement of real jobs with temporary work – the dynamics of corporate globalization – impact everyone, everywhere. It also draws attention to the democratic resistance arising globally to challenge the hegemony of brands

Hollywood and The Pentagon: A Dangerous Liaison

06:30

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The American Army’s intrusion in Hollywood war films may surprise some. In fact, the U.S. Army secret services have had close ties with American filmmakers for several decades. The movie Top Gun, for instance, was filmed with the support and approval of the U.S. Army. There is even a special bureau, the Film Liaison Office, that oversees these issues for the Pentagon and the Capitol. It has a clear mission: studying the scripts of American war movies, deciding whether to offer them support or not, depending on their interest for the country’s military leaders.

Scripts are cut and sometimes watered down. Characters are changed and historical truth, sometimes fudged. One director might be loaned combat jets and ships, and all their equipment, enabling him to shoot the scenes written by his scriptwriters. Another director, whose script displeases the army, may be refused any kind of support. That was the case for the film Platoon, deemed overly critical of the Vietnam War. It is then up to the producers to look for shooting locations and equipment outside the United States. Often, at considerable cost.

In his Pentagon office, the head of the Film Liaison Office makes no secret of his goals. He wants to encourage films which flatter the U.S. Army, win support for its actions on the battle field, and encourage more soldiers to sign up. In short: pure propaganda. Few great war films have escaped the influence, or even the censure, of the U.S. Army.

Weapons of Mass Deception

06:27

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WMD, a 100 minute non-fiction film, explores this story with the findings of a gutsy, media insider-turned-outsider, former network journalist, Danny Schechter, who is one of America’s most prolific media critics.

Schechter says he “self-embedded” himself in his living room to monitor media coverage, by fastidiously tracking the TV coverage on a daily basis.

He wrote thousands of words daily about the coverage for Mediachannel.org, the world’s largest online media issues network, and then collected his columns, blogs and articles in a recently published book, EMBEDDED: Weapons of Mass Deception (Prometheus Books).

He has continued his one-man investigation with WMD, a two-hour indie non-fiction film that asks the questions that his media colleagues refused to confront before, during and after the war. Featuring footage from inside Iraq, and inside the media, WMD tracks the media war through February 2004

Breaking The Mirror: The Murdoch Effect

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The Daily Mirror was the best of them. It was a tabloid when tabloids still meant a peoples’ paper that respected its’ readers and earned their trust and affection…This film is a personal tribute, but it’s also the story of what happened to the once popular Mirror. How the reporting of the blood, sweat, and tears of ordinary people has changed out of all recognition. Above all, it’s the story of a rise of a new kind of tabloid and a new kind of media power now set to dominate much of the world.

The British public were told that the new information technology, heralded by The Sun’s move to Wapping, would bring a greater variety of newspapers and a more diverse media. But it produced a contracted press controlled by ever fewer proprietors. John Pilger describes the downfall of his old paper and the all-pervasive influence of Rupert Murdoch.

The War You Don’t See

06:18

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A powerful and timely investigation into the media’s role in war, tracing the history of embedded and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq.

As weapons and propaganda become even more sophisticated, the nature of war is developing into an electronic battlefield in which journalists play a key role, and civilians are the victims. But who is the real enemy?

John Pilger says in the film: “We journalists… have to be brave enough to defy those who seek our collusion in selling their latest bloody adventure in someone else’s country… That means always challenging the official story, however patriotic that story may appear, however seductive and insidious it is.

For propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home… In this age of endless imperial war, the lives of countless men, women and children depend on the truth or their blood is on us… Those whose job it is to keep the record straight ought to be the voice of people, not power.”