DOCUMENTARIES TO CONSIDER

London and the City of London are not the same place. London is a metropolis of 8 million people. The City of London is the famous square mile in the middle, with about 7,000 residents but many more businesses. A Corporation older than Parliament, the City of London has played a key historical role in protecting and promoting the interests of finance capital. Secret City investigates the power wielded by the Corporation of London over British economic policy, through which it sustains London's prime position at the hub of global finance capital - not least through control of the majority of the world's tax havens. The film exposes the Corporation's anti-democratic constitution, the ancient laws which allow it function as a state within a state, and thus to promote an illusory promise of economic growth at the cost of the real economy. Secret City questions the Corporation's role through contributions from Londoners, including scholars, an MP, a businessman, Church people and activists. Participants include Lord Glasman, John McDonnell MP, the Revs. William Taylor (Stamford Hill) and Alan Green (Bethnal Green), Natalie Bennett, Malcolm Matson, Occupy activists, and Professors Doreen Massey, Robin Blackburn, Steven Haseler and Clive Bloom. The film engages with the different 'narratives' that attach to the City through a range of London imagery, including rarely seen archive footage, and extracts from two films about London by independent filmmakers: Anthony Simmons' 'Bow Bells' (1954) and William Raban's 'About Now MMX' (2010). The music is taken from the popular nursery rhyme, 'Oranges and Lemons', heard in numerous different versions, including an original score by Simon Zagorski-Thomas.

Oliver Stone's re-examination of under-reported events in American history.

An exploration of the fracking petroleum extraction industry and the serious environmental consequences involved.

A documentary on the life, music, and legacy of Bob Marley.

Based on footage shot in the early seventies and lost for more than thirty years, NAACP IMAGE AWARD winner Esther Anderson takes us on a journey to Jamaica and into 56 HOPE ROAD, Kingston, to see and hear the young BOB MARLEY before he was famous. The film shows us the WAILERS' first rehearsal, when the idea of a Jamaican supergroup like the BEATLES or the STONES was still just a dream. We sit in on the launch of their international career with "GET UP STAND UP", "I SHOT THE SHERIFF", and the "BURNIN'" and "CATCH A FIRE" albums that brought to the world REGGAE music and RASTA consciousness together as one, starting a revolution that would change rock music and contemporary culture.

Analyzes the concept of the corporation throughout recent history up to its present-day dominance.

'Truck Farm' is a whimsical, musically-narrated, documentary film about urban agriculture. Filmmaker Ian Cheney (KING CORN, THE GREENING OF SOUTHIE, THE CITY DARK) planted a 1/1000th-acre farm in the back of his 1986 Dodge pick-up-truck in the spring of 2009, after coming to New York City and lacking any other place of his own to grow food. Using green-roof materials, heirloom seeds, and a healthy dose of optimism and humor, Ian created a mobile community farm that yielded a wide range of vegetables and led to the discovery and exploration of other creative, quirky, community-based agriculture efforts all over the city.

Wars of the future will be fought over water as they are over oil today, as the source of human survival enters the global marketplace and political arena. Corporate giants, private investors, and corrupt governments vie for control of our dwindling supply, prompting protests, lawsuits, and revolutions from citizens fighting for the right to survive. Past civilizations have collapsed from poor water management.

A film about the noted American linguist/political dissident and his warning about corporate media's role in modern propaganda.

Looks at the arguments for capitalism and technology, such as greater efficiency, more time and less work, and argues that these are not being fulfilled, and they never will be.

King Corn is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. In King Corn, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America's most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat-and how we farm

A fascinating look at how American agricultural policy and food culture developed in the 20th century, and how the California food movement rebelled against big agribusiness to launch the local organic food movement.

Examines the role of the bottled water industry and its effects on our health, climate change, pollution, and our reliance on oil.

The Second World War In Colour [1999] is a seven-part documentary which reveals hours of previously unseen colour film of World War II. As almost all newsreel film was shot in black and white, this DVD offers a completely new portrait of the war. Dramatic colour footage from as early as 1933 shows home movies of Adolf Hitler and his cohorts, the devastation wrought by the Blitzkrieg, life on the home front, D-Day and the Allied invasion of France, British bombers defying German fighters, the horror of the Holocaust that troops met as they entered Germany, and the jubilation of the final Allied victory. With John Thaw's narration intercut with spoken accounts from the letters and diaries of those who fought, those who survived, and those the war claimed as victims, this documentary is an extraordinary remembrance of a monumental time in world history.

The World War 2 Battle of Stalingrad from the initial attack to the repatriation of the survivors after the war.

Late in the 1980s, two documentary film makers found six German men, all in their 60s and 70s, who had been soldiers in the German invasion of the USSR in 1942. Each carried an 8mm camera into battle and they still had their film. "Mein Kreig" alternates between interviews with these older men, now apologetic, philosophical, or defiant about their participation, and the footage they shot. It's chronological: basic training, the train trip East, roof-top vistas of war-torn Warsaw, peasants in Belarus, the downing with carbine volleys of a Russian plane, winter, a holiday at the Black Sea, mud, impassable roads, death, destruction and retreat. "Home, that was the front," one says.

a powerful movie about the Swiss Rock band "Luke Gasser Band" on European Tour with the legendary band "Nazareth" from Scotland. Switzerland, Germany, Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia, Holland, Belgium back to Switzerland... During a time when the European Union is falling apart. This is not just another road movie, it's a movie about religion, politics, war and how Rock'n'Roll saw it all coming.