Film

Documents Expose How Hollywood Promotes War On Behalf Of Pentagon, CIA And NSA

July 5, 2017 Tom Secker, www.medium.com Educate! CIA, Film, Media, NSA, Pentagon

By Tom Secker for Insurge Intelligence/ Medium - Alongside the massive scale of these operations, our new book National Security Cinema details how US government involvement also includes script rewrites on some of the biggest and most popular films, including James Bond, the Transformers franchise, and movies from the Marvel and DC cinematic universes. A similar influence is exerted over military-supported TV, which ranges from Hawaii Five-O to America’s Got Talent, Oprah and Jay Leno to Cupcake Wars, along with numerous documentaries by PBS, the History Channel and the BBC. National Security Cinema also reveals how dozens of films and TV shows have been supported and influenced by the CIA, including the James Bond adventure Thunderball, the Tom Clancy thriller Patriot Games and more recent films, including Meet the Parents and Salt. The CIA even helped to make an episode of Top Chef that was hosted at Langley, featuring then-CIA director Leon Panetta who was shown as having to skip dessert to attend to vital business. Was this scene real, or was it a dramatic statement for the cameras?

“Do Not Resist”: Police Militarization Documentary Everyone Should See

October 15, 2016 Ryan Devereaux, www.theintercept.com Educate! Documentary, Film, Militarization, Police

By Ryan Devereaux for The Intercept - The officers, members of the Richland County Sheriff’s Department tactical team, were descending on a modest one-story house looking for drugs and guns. The team smashed through the windows of the home with iron pikes, then stormed the front door with rifles raised. Inside, they found a terrified family of four, including an infant. As the family members were pulled outside, Atkinson’s camera captured a scene that plays out with startling regularity in cities and towns across the country

Experience ‘RIKERS,’ Face To Face

October 15, 2016 Bill Moyers, www.wagingnonviolence.org Create! Film, Prisons, Rikers

By Bill Moyers for Moyers & Company - Over the years I have landed at New York’s LaGuardia Airport knowing that the island just off and below the tip of the right wing was Rikers, the city’s largest jail, isolated in the East River within sight of the Manhattan skyline and separated from the borough of Queens by a single bridge. Looking across at the stark jumble of buildings, I had often thought of Alcatraz, on the other side of the continent: penal colonies framing America’s gateways.

20 Latino PBS Films To Stream For Free During Hispanic Heritage Month

September 29, 2016 Andrew S. Vargas, www.remezcla.com Create! Film, Hispanic Heritage Month

By Andrew S. Vargas for Remezcla - ll folks, it’s September again, which means a whole year has passed since we last celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month. A year that brought us cultural milestones like Jane the Virgin, Chile campeón, and Donald Trump – demonstrative evidence that in life you win some, and you lose some. So while we’ll let white America take Hispanic Heritage Month as an opportunity to reflect on the profound impact Latinos have had on American culture, from Jordi Farragut up through Sonia Sotomayor, it’s also a good opportunity for us to celebrate the richness and diversity of our own experience.

How ‘Snowden’ Film Could Help Win Pardon For Snowden The Man

September 22, 2016 James Bamford, www.reuters.com Educate! Edward Snowden, Film

By James Bamford for Reuters - The days leading up to last Friday’s release of director Oliver Stone’s Snowden looked like one long movie trailer. The American Civil Liberties Union and other human-right groups on Wednesday announced a campaign to win a presidential pardon for Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contract employee who leaked hundreds of thousands of its highly classified documents to journalists.

Why Oliver Stone’s Snowden Is Best Film Of Year

September 15, 2016 David Swanson, www.counterpunch.org Create! Edward Snowden, Film

By David Swanson for Counter Punch - Snowden is the most entertaining, informing, and important film you are likely to see this year. It’s the true story of an awakening. It traces the path of Edward Snowden’s career in the U.S. military, the CIA, the NSA, and at various contractors thereof. It also traces the path of Edward Snowden’s agonizingly slow awakening to the possibility that the U.S. government might sometimes be wrong, corrupt, or criminal. And of course the film takes us through Snowden’s courageous and principled act of whistleblowing.

Why I Am Returning My Award

November 9, 2015 Arundhati Roy, www.indianexpress.com Resist! Film, India

By Arundhati Roy for The Indian Express - Although I do not believe that awards are a measure of the work we do, I would like to add the National Award for Best Screenplay that I won in 1989 to the growing pile of returned awards. Also, I want to make it clear that I am not returning this award because I am “shocked” by what is being called the “growing intolerance” being fostered by the present government. First of all, “intolerance” is the wrong word to use for the lynching, shooting, burning and mass murder of fellow human beings. Second, we had plenty of advance notice of what lay in store for us — so I cannot claim to be shocked by what has happened after this government was enthusiastically voted into office with an overwhelming majority.

The Black Panthers Are Back

October 1, 2015 Reese Erlich ,www.commondreams.org Educate! Documentary, Film

By Reese Erlich for Common Dreams - Seeing a documentary on the Black Panthers while sitting next to Bobby Seale is quite an experience. As we watch a press preview of the film in an East Oakland home, the co-founder of the Panthers sometimes calls out the names of old comrades as they appear on screen, or he corrects an occasional error in the film. The documentary to be aired on PBS, "The Black Panther Party: Vanguard of the Revolution," has a dramatic moment describing the 1969 Chicago 8 trial when Seale demanded the right to defend himself. The Chicago federal judge refused, and he ordered Seale shackled and gagged. As the film played audio tape of the scene, Bobby Seale, sitting next to me, recreates the sound of his speaking through the gag: "I want my freedom! I want my right to defend myself!" "The Black Panther Party" is the latest in series of feature films and documentaries about the Oakland group that shook the establishment then -- and causes controversy even today.

Year Of The Woman

July 31, 2015 Rebecca Traister, www.highline.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Feminism, Film, History, Media

By Rebecca Traister in Huffington Post - For only five nights in the fall of 1973, a documentary called “Year of the Woman” played at the Fifth Avenue Cinema in Greenwich Village. Crowds lined up around the block. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., described it as “the greatest combination of sex and politics ever seen in a film.” And then “Year of the Woman” all but vanished for 42 years, robbing us of a movie that captures–in its raucous, weird, unmistakably ’70s style–one of the most pivotal moments in feminist history. The setting is the Democratic convention in Miami Beach. The time is July 1972. New York Rep. Shirley Chisholm has just completed a groundbreaking campaign for the presidency (“I ran because someone had to do it first,” she would later write), and the National Women’s Political Caucus, founded by icons including Betty Friedan, Dorothy Height and Gloria Steinem, is trying to leverage women’s power at a political convention for the first time.

The Guardian Review Of New Film: We Are Many

May 21, 2015 Paul Barfoot, www.theguardian.com Educate! Film, Iraq, Media, Wars and Militarism

We Are Many, Amir Amirani’s epic film about the global anti Iraq war protests of 2003, received a four-minute standing ovation when it debuted at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival last June. The buzz about its national cinema release this Thursday (21 May) was amplified by Stephen Fry enthusing: “I’m not sure a trailer has ever made me want to see a film more,” to his 9.7 million Twitter army. Britpop godfather Damon Albarn has announced that he will be joining Amir and a select panel for a Q&A that will be streamed live on the opening night of the film at all participating cinemas. As such, the documentary is blessed with credible hype, and the foyer of north-east London’s Rio cinema was thick with anticipation on Sunday afternoon as Guardian Members came together for an exclusive preview of the one-to-watch doc from the new Michael Moore on the block.

A Tale Of Two Movies

February 6, 2015 John Reuwer, www.worldbeyondwar.org Educate! Film, Media, Wars and Militarism

As a student and teacher of nonviolent action, I was disheartened last week to wake up and read of the box office success of what I thought was yet another shoot-em-up action film, the American Sniper, while the same day noting that a film about my field, Selma,though successful, was not even in the same ballpark with the money. It made me wonder why, so I went to see them. These movies tell the story of two American heroes, the most lethal sniper in American military history, Christopher Kyle, and the most remembered name in the US civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr. We are presented with two very different kinds of heroes, by many accounts both played accurately by their actors.

Poitras And Engelhardt On Snowden

October 21, 2014 Laura Poitras and Tom Engelhardt, www.tomdispatch.com Educate! Edward Snowden, Film, Freedom of Speech and Assembly, Journalism, Media, NSA, Surveillance

Tom Engelhardt: Could you start by laying out briefly what you think we've learned from Edward Snowden about how our world really works? Laura Poitras: The most striking thing Snowden has revealed is the depth of what the NSA and the Five Eyes countries [Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Great Britain, and the U.S.] are doing, their hunger for all data, for total bulk dragnet surveillance where they try to collect all communications and do it all sorts of different ways. Their ethos is "collect it all." I worked on a story with Jim Risen of the New York Times about a document -- a four-year plan for signals intelligence -- in which they describe the era as being "the golden age of signals intelligence." For them, that’s what the Internet is: the basis for a golden age to spy on everyone. This focus on bulk, dragnet, suspicionless surveillance of the planet is certainly what’s most staggering.

New Documentary Exposes Destruction Of Justice System

August 27, 2014 Messiah Rhodes, www.wagingnonviolence.org Educate! Film, Mass Incarceration, Police, Prison

Control is a feature-length documentary that tells the story of Luther, an African American teenager whose life has been caught in the web of the criminal justice system. Co-directors Chris Bravo, an independent filmmaker, and Lindsey Schneider, who works for Vice, investigate how the system of mass incarceration affects the court system, high schools and the living rooms where families confront it on a daily basis. A three-year-long project, Bravo and Schneider followed Luther, affectionately known as Mouse, as he deals with a felonious second-degree assault charge, which he received by simply being outside of his building. Yet, Control is not primarily a story about guilt or innocence, crime or punishment, but rather about how the ongoing presence of the justice system in this community infuses every aspect of daily life. I sat down with Chris Bravo and Lindsey Schneider in Union Square Park recently to discuss their film, which recently won the Best Documentary award at The People’s Film Festival in New York City and which has been screened at the Oakland International Film Festival, the Landlocked Film Festival and many other venues.

Oliver Stone To Helm Edward Snowden Film

June 3, 2014 Leo Barraclough, www.variety.com Educate! Edward Snowden, Film, Oliver Stone

Oliver Stone and long-time producing partner Moritz Borman have nabbed the rights to “The Snowden Files, The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man,” written by journalist Luke Harding. Stone will pen and helm the film, drawing from Harding’s account of events surrounding the Guardian newspaper’s reporting of the disclosures provided by Edward Snowden. Stone has started to write the screenplay and Borman is fast-tracking it as a European co-production to start filming before the end of the year. The book was described by the New York Times as “a fast-paced, almost novelistic narrative that is part bildungsroman and part cinematic thriller.” Stone said: “This is one of the greatest stories of our time. A real challenge. I’m glad to have the Guardian working with us.”

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