For years, there has been widespread speculation, but very little consensus, about the relationship between violent video games and violence in the real world. Joystick Warriors provides the clearest account yet of the latest research on this issue. Drawing on the insights of media scholars, military analysts, combat veterans, and gamers themselves, the film trains its sights on the wildly popular genre of first-person shooter games, exploring how the immersive experience they offer links up with the larger stories we tell ourselves as a culture about violence, militarism, guns, and manhood. Along the way, it examines the game industry's longstanding working relationship with the US military and the American gun industry, and offers a riveting examination of the games themselves -- showing how they work to sanitize, glamorize, and normalize violence while cultivating dangerously regressive attitudes and ideas about masculinity and militarism.
Travel back to late 18th century Lowell, MA, now infamous for its textile mills and its "Lowell Girls," the poor, barely-educated waifs who helped turn those mills into sweatshops.
Unknown or forgotten by most Americans, the Korean War divided a people with several millenniums of shared history. Memory of Forgotten War conveys the human costs of military conflict through deeply personal accounts of four Korean American survivors whose experiences and memories embrace the full circle of the war: its outbreak and the day-to-day struggle for survival, separation from family members across the DMZ, the aftermath of a devastated Korean peninsula, and immigration to the United States. Each person reunites with relatives in North Korea conveying beyond words the meaning of four decades of family loss. Their stories belie the notion that war ends for civilians when the guns are silenced and foreshadow the futures of countless others displaced by ongoing military conflict today.
In Jandamarra's War, we learn how in the 1890's the European colonialists arrive in the Kimberley with vast herds of sheep and cattle, determined to make their fortune by feeding a rapidly growing population in the South. But the settlers soon discover they are in land populated with indigenous tribes, ready to fight the red-faced invaders.
Hawaii - an exotic tropical world far out in the Pacific, characterized by volcanoes that are still active and frightening to this day. Settled in the prehistoric times by Polynesian sailors, who by simple means captured the enormous expanse of the Pacific. Home to the wave of waves, which has developed from a cultic action to a popular sport and has an enormous cultural significance to this day. This film shows the whole impressive beauty of this exotic world in breathtaking aerial photographs and detailed close-ups. The camera flies over glowing lava fields and through lush green 38 gorges.
On January 30, 1970 The Warehouse opened its doors in New Orleans to thousands of fans to see The Flock, Fleetwood Mac, and The Grateful Dead. In the ensuing 12 years some of the greatest musicians would grace this stage, including The Allman Brothers, Bob Dylan, The Doors, Pink Floyd, The Who, Bob Marley, David Bowie, and more. This documentary captures the magic of this iconic rock music venue.
Seen through the eyes of the filmmaker, a child of concentration camp survivors, this program explores the impact of the Holocaust on a generation of Jews and Germans born after World War II. Includes interviews in Canada, Israel, and Germany with the children of survivors, with young neo-Nazis, and with the children of former Nazis.
The Circle is a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100m underground. It is a 27km particle accelerator used by physicists to study the origin of everything. Results and interpretation of the collisions of particles will revolutionize our understanding of the Universe and how it began. The Circle leaves the scientific aspect of the experiment and makes a journey above the ground. We follow the 27km circle in an existential search for local people with an opinion about what's happening below.
Things aren't looking good for the world's population; as we multiply at an alarming rate there is not enough food, space... or sense. This intelligent film interweaves a fascinating 1960s rat experiment by Dr. John B. Calhoun with a slick snapshot of today's urban jungle.
Deep in Brazil, where law and justice require first and last name, the struggle for a piece of land becomes a matter of life or death. "Threatened" shows peasants in the South and Southeast of Pará, who have to fight for a piece of land for farming and living.
Good People Go to Hell, Saved People Go to Heaven explores evangelical Christian belief and culture against the backdrop of hurricanes, coastal devastation and apocalyptic fear. The film follows a cross-carrying fundamentalist preacher, a moralizing youth choir leader, an agenda-filled mega church pastor, and a compelling array of urban and rural born-again believers. All believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, and share a desire to prepare themselves and the world for the biblical End Times. In its pursuit to present this world authentically, Good People Go to Hell offers fresh and valuable insight into conservative evangelical Christian belief and its connection to the essence of American identity and doctrine in the 21st century.
This documentary touches on a very special relationship between animals and humans in a little piece of Africa transplanted from Europe. These transplanted lions will live out their lives in a happier, more natural environment than they knew in Europe - but they will never become truly wild again…
The killer whale was long feared as a fierce merciless predator until, in May 1964, one was brought into captivity for the first time. It quickly became clear they were highly intelligent, social creatures. Learn more about these behemoths of the seas in this look into their lives.