47m; Denmark
Director: Miki Mistrati and U Roberto Romano
Synopsis (IMDB): A team of journalists investigate how human trafficking and child labor in the Ivory Coast fuels the worldwide chocolate industry. The crew interview both proponents and opponents of these alleged practices, and use hidden camera techniques to delve into the gritty world of cocoa plantations.
Contact: http://www.thedarksideofchocolate.org/
60m; Ireland
Director: Socialist Party of Ireland
Synopsis (Indybay): “The GAMA Strike – We Are Workers Not Slaves” by the Socialist Party of Ireland describes how Turkish workers took on their employer, Turkish-owned multinational construction giant GAMA. Assisted by the Socialist Party (Ireland), whose members first exposed the scandalous wages and conditions being paid by GAMA to its Turkish workers, they engaged in a bitter and hard fought battle, which eventually brought GAMA to heel.
Contact: Full documentary available to view here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8522850390691204183
80m; U.S.
Director: Chris Smith, Dan Ollman, Sarah Price
Synopsis (IMDB): A comedic documentary which follows The Yes Men, a small group of prankster activists, as they gain world-wide notoriety for impersonating the World Trade Organization on television and at business conferences around the world. The film begins when two members of The Yes Men, Andy and Mike, set up a website that mimics the World Trade Organization’s–and it’s mistaken for the real thing. They play along with the ruse and soon find themselves invited to important functions as WTO representatives. Delighted to represent the organization they politically oppose, Andy and Mike don thrift-store suits and set out to shock unwitting audiences with darkly comic satire that highlights the worst aspects of global free trade
109m; France
Director: Marie-Monique Robin
Synopsis: Marie-Monique Robin has produced a powerful and frightening film in understanding the danger on a global level of out of control genetic engineering and the food industry. Workers, farmers, consumers and the environmentalists are all threatened by the unregulated development and growth products from this industry. The US media have censored the role of Monsanto and other biotech companies in spreading genetically engineered products that are harmful to workers in the laboratory, farmers and consumers around the world.Injured biotech worker David Bell who worked at Agraquest in Davis, which was owned by a former Monsanto Pest Division molecular biologist Pam Marrone, is one of the victims of this unbridled development and cover-up by the biotech industry.
DVD
45 minutes, 1992, Tanzania, Africa
Director: Flora M’mbugu-Schelling
in Kimakonde and Swahili with English subtitles
http://newsreel.org/video/THESE-HANDS
Who would have suspected that a 45 minute documentary about women crushing rocks, without narration or plot, would offer one of the most unforgettable and rewarding experiences of recent African cinema? Flora M’mbugu-Schelling’s quiet tribute to women at the very bottom of the international economic order ultimately deepens into a mediation on human labor itself. These Hands will stimulate viewers to rethink documentary and to question their own role as consumers in a global economy.
93m; U.S.
Director: John Carpenter
Cast: Roddy Piper, Keith David and Meg Foster
Synopsis (IMDB): Nada, a down-on-his-luck construction worker, discovers a pair of special sunglasses. Wearing them, he is able to see the world as it really is: people being bombarded by media and government with messages like “Stay Asleep”, “No Imagination”, “Submit to Authority”. Even scarier is that he is able to see that some usually normal-looking people are in fact ugly aliens in charge of the massive campaign to keep humans subdued.
16m; U.S.
Director: Jeremy Blasi
Synopsis: Examination of the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
93m;
Director: Du Haibin
Contact: http://icarusfilms.com/new2008/umb.html
lori@icarusfilms.com
The program of economic reforms initiated in China in 1978 by Deng Xiaoping aimed to finance the modernization of the nation. But what Communist Party leaders called “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” looked suspiciously to many as a return to capitalism. Today, some three decades later, the results of those sweeping economic reforms have become plainly visible in a country increasingly divided between its rural and urban sectors.
Filmed in five different regions of China, UMBRELLA provides a telling look at the vast changes that have taken place in Chinese society, including a massive migration from the countryside to the cities, the rise of a prosperous new class of businesspeople, millions of new college graduates competing for a shrinking number of jobs, and the neglect of China’s largest population group, its rural peasants.
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