I really love film, and for the last few years I’ve been getting more and more interested in watching documentaries. While I still think you can’t beat passing a few hours with some great storytelling, these documentaries have really inspired me to think more deeply about the world we live in. So, in no particular order:

1. The Corporation

Directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, and written by Joel Bakan, this film won an astonishing 24 international awards and 10 Audience Awards (including one at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival). The premise was rather unique: since the corporation is deemed in the eyes of the law to have the rights of a person (and sometimes more), what sort of a person would the corporation be? This was a highly enjoyable film exploring the history of the modern corporation and asked some incredibly pertinent questions about its impact in our age of globalization.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Official Website - The Book

2. Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media

An earlier film also directed by Mark Achbar (along with Peter Wintonick), it explores the life of Noam Chomsky, specifically focusing on his ideas about the mass media in democratic societies as put forward in the book “Manufacturing Consent”, co-authored with Edward S. Herman. This is an incredibly provocative film, and will make you question basic truths about Western society.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Wikipedia - Companion Book to the Film

3. The Fog of War

Winner at the Oscars in 2003 for Best Documentary Feature, the Fog of War was filmed by legendary director Errol Morris, often credited as the founder of the modern documentary. The film is loosely based around eleven lessons learnt by former US Secretary of Defense Robert S McNamara during his often controversial life. Covering both his personal life, the Vietnam war and the Cuban Missile Crisis, amongst other key events in US history, it’s often an extremely candid and insightful film in politics, war and international relations.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Official Website - Wikipedia

4. Capturing the Friedmans

Still one of the most amazing documentaries I’ve ever watched, Capturing the Friedmans was directed by Andrew Jarecki and won at least ten international awards for its harrowing tale. Originally intending to shoot a film about children entertainers in New York, Jarecki learns that the father and youngest brother of one of the entertainers, David Friedman, was arrested in a paedophile scandal. Astonishingly, the Friedman family documented the entire period through with a home video recorder, providing an incredible insight into the effect the episode had on their family. The more Jarecki digs, the clearer it becomes that the paedophile scandal was not all that it appears to be. Essential viewing.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Official Website - Wikipedia

5. Grizzly Man

Directed by the legendary Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man is about the life and death Timothy Treadwell, an environmentalist and bear lover who, over thirteen years of visiting and living in bear territory in Alaska, believed that he had been accepted by the bears he loved and protected. Ultimately, he was to be proven tragically wrong when he and his girlfriend were killed and eaten by a bear. The film is essentially an exploration of man’s place in nature, and the boundaries that exist between being human, and being a wild animal; a brilliant film.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Wikipedia

6. Bus 174

Winner of at least 23 international prizes and awards, including an Emmy, Bus 174 is a Brazillian film directed by Jose Padilha. It essentially tells two stories: the first is a bus hijacking, caught live on camera, where Sandro do Nascimento, a typical, young Rio de Janeiro street kid, held hostages on Bus 174 for over four hours while the police attempted (and failed) to control the situation. The second part, interwoven into the first, is what drove Sandro to this point, and reveals how society had constantly failed to try provide him and others like him any type of meaningful existence. Social commentary doesn’t get much better than this.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Official Website - Wikipedia

7. I Know I’m Not Alone

A film that I’ve reviewed before on here, the film follows musician and political activist Michael Franti as he goes on a journey to Iraq, Israel and Palestine to meet the people affected by war and occupation. This was a truly outstanding piece of political and social commentary that tried to help build bridges between real people.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Official Website

8. Koyaanisqatsi/Powaqqatsi

These two films, as well as the third film in the trilogy called Naqoyqatsi, remain as beautiful, inspiring, and thought-provoking now as when the first film, Koyaanisqatsi, was released in 1982. Directed by Godfrey Reggio, the films have no real dialogue, and consist of just simple and moving imagery of our world overlayed with the wonderful music composed by Philip Glass (the third film, however, focuses more on image manipulation rather than simply film). These timeless films explore the relationship between mankind and nature, urban life and technology versus nature, and between the so-called first and third worlds.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Wikipedia - Official Website

9. The Devil And Daniel Johnston

A film about genius and insanity, director Jeff Feuerzeig documents the life of singer and songwriter Daniel Johnston through Daniel’s own film and tape footage, as well as interviews with friends, family and supporters. Hailed as a musical genius and inspiration to some of the most influential bands over the last twenty years (such as Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Sonic Youth), he also suffered from deep mental problems that lay unrecognised for many years (he was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder). A deeply moving documentary.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Wikipedia - Official Website

10. Planet Earth

Probably the most stunning nature documentary ever made, the critically-acclaimed BBC series is a landmark in nature film-making, providing some of the most unique cinematography ever put on film. Enough said, really.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Wikipedia - Official Website

Honorable Mentions:
Supersize Me
Winged Migration
Microcosmos
Baraka
The Yes Men
American Blackout
The Power of Nightmares (Available online)
The Century of Self (Available online)
The Thin Blue Line
Beyond the Gates of Splendour

BBC4 just screened Nahid Persson’s Prostitution Behind The Veil, which was nominated in 2005 for an Emmy award. It also one a Guldbagge in Sweden for best documentary in 2005, and. achieved honours at the Creteil International Women’s Films Festival.

Born in Iran in 1960, Nahid Persson fled the country over twenty years ago and now lives in Sweden where she has studied microbiology. She also founded a radio station there. In 1993 she began studies at Film-och TV Skolan, and received master class education from 2003-2004. (Danish Film Institute)

The film was excellent, if rather shocking. Persson has returned to Iran “make a documentary, but not this one.” In Iran, “she finds the divisions between the classes greater than ever, unemployment has skyrocketed and widespread disillusionment provides a lucrative market for an elderly man, Habib, who sells prophecies on the streets” using canaries to pluck random, written predictions from a box. Deciding to make a documentary about the fortune teller, while filming “she was both shocked and intrigued to discover” Habib shared “his accommodation with Minna and Fariba”, two female prostitutes who are both heroin addicts. As Persson explains, the two “women were happy that someone was interested in their plight”:

“We had a natural relation. We trusted each other,” Persson says. “They even asked me on several occasions to go with them when they were going to meet some of their regular customers, because they were from some police station. But I didn’t do it out of the fear that I had to film someone who wears the uniform of a pasdar [Iran’s Revolutionary Guard]. And it was also better for them that I didn’t do it.”

Both women had become drug addicts due to addicted husbands. Fariba was given it by her husband to treat her kidney pain, and slowly got addicted; eventually “her husband sends her into the street and tells her, ‘Go bring clients.’” According to the film, Fariba had two children, one of which she still had, but the other, a three month old baby, was sold off by her husband. Minna’s story was similar in that her husband was arrested for drug running and more, and she turned to prostitution when she ended up living on the street with her child. She claimed she had no idea of his crimes, but he did get her onto drugs, too. Both women are often forced to take their children with them as they seek clients.

The film reveals how Shia Islam law can be used to “legally” conduct prostitution:

Men in Iran can find a way to buy sex and still comply with Muslim law by way of “Sighe,” a temporary marriage legal in Shia Islam. A Sighe marriage can last from two hours up to 99 years. Both Minna and Fariba participate in this pseudo-marriage with many of their customers

The film is well made, and sympathetic to the characters, and reveals a hidden side to Iran, where an official Iranian report concluded in 2000 that “Drug addiction is the rage among schoolchildren, prostitution has increased 635% among high school students and the (growth) rate of suicide in the country has exceeded the record by 109%.” The film looks at some of the prime causes of this: unemployment and poverty, and the fact that contraceptives were banned after the Iranian Revolution which led, from 1970 to 1990, to an almost doubling of the population from 28.4 to 54.6 million people.

All in all the film is worth watching to try and gain a better understanding of the social issues Iran faces.

Great doc just screened on BBC called Is business the real Big Brother?

“As we move throughout cities, throughout our jobs and lives, there are technologies and devices everywhere which capture our movements, capture our activities, which are then stored on databases as evidence of what we’ve been doing.”
- Dr Kirstie Ball, Open University

You can download it here. (I just started reading Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID. Excellent, expect a review soon, but definitely read this book).

Wired is reporting that a video game that exists within the online game Second Life is causing a stir - apparantly because it’s mimicking the real world where parents no doubt moan the fact that their kids are online all the time playing games like Second Life.

“People started to complain that Tringo was harming the culture,” says Wagner James Au, the writer who has reported on Second Life as an “embedded” journalist for the last three years. “They felt it was ruining the social nature of the game. People were just showing up to play. They weren’t socializing or buying stuff any more.”

In essence, it was classic libel against video games: That they encourage isolation, with each player staring glassy-eyed at the evil, hypnotic screen. The irony here, of course, is that these complaints were coming from players who themselves were spending hours staring at their own computer screens while they played Second Life. Dig it: People were complaining that a game was ruining the quality of virtual life inside a game.

Of course, this said as much about the nature of Second Life as about Tringo. Second Lifers do not regard their world as a game: It’s a social environment, a chat room on steroids — a platform for an alternate life.

Just goes to show, even alternate realities can’t escape from reality.