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Tai Chi Health in 6 Minutes

Simplified Tai Chi 24 for Beginners DVD is the perfect way to experience the amazing health benefits of a shortened Tai Chi form, no matter your current fitness level. The ancient art of Tai Chi is often described as “moving meditation” because it stimulates your mind, body, and spirit.

The simplified 24-posture form is taught and demonstrated in detail by Master Helen Liang in short, easy-to-follow sections. This popular form is shown clearly from multiple angles, with step-by-step instructions.

With this 6-minute Tai Chi form, you’ll feel stronger and more energized. Tai Chi is known for improving balance and keeping the mind sharp and positive. This Tai Chi form is excellent for beginners at any age, those who want a low-impact whole-body exercise, and those with limited time.

• Easy-to-follow step-by-step instruction
• Front and rear view demonstrations
• The most popular Tai Chi form in the world

The Tai Chi 24 form takes only 6 minutes to practice but offers benefits for your entire life.

Improve Your Health with Tai Chi

Tai Chi for Women is a simple follow-along workout for beginners. Using exercises that target women’s most common health issues, Master Helen shows you how to stay healthy, flexible, and youthful at any age.

You will learn natural ways to relieve stress, improve your balance, feel energetic, and strengthen your bones. Tai chi uses low-impact moves to stimulate your circulation and cardiovascular system, and can be used to relieve arthritis. The gentle stretching and deep breathing within tai chi help you to feel calm and relaxed

• Easy-to-follow step-by-step instruction
• Mirror view demonstrations from side to side
• Effective ways to heal and prevent the most common ailments

Tai Chi for Women will empower you to lead a healthier and more balanced life.

Content Includes:

• Introduction
• Relaxation Warm Up
• Energy Exercises
• Tai Chi Stepping Exercises
• Tai Chi Form Instruction
• Tai Chi Form - Front View
• Tai Chi Form - Rear View
• Keys to Success
• Conclusion
• Follow-along Workout

Follow-along Workout is a DVD chapter you can use after you’ve watched the whole video lesson a few times. You can instantly practice the follow along exercises with Master Helen, and skip the more detailed instructions when you have limited time.

Improve Your Balance and Prevent Falls

In Tai Chi Fit Over 50 Balance Exercises, master teacher David-Dorian Ross leads you through a simple tai chi lesson. This follow-along routine is shown in a mirror-view format with nothing to memorize. Just follow the moves, and you’ll enjoy the health benefits of tai chi, with a focus on improved balance, strength, and stability.

Perfect for seniors, those with limited mobility, or anyone looking to improve their balance and prevent falls, the OVER 50 balance routine combines basic tai chi moves for an easy, whole-body workout. You’ll feel relaxed and energized afterward.

Tai Chi Fit Over 50 Balance Exercises includes

• Mirror-view tai chi moves to the left and right.
• Low-impact, whole-body exercises to improve balance.
• A beginner-friendly follow-along workout—no experience needed.

A deeper conversation about improving immunity

Modern science shows that qigong exercise is good medicine for maintaining health and promoting healing.

Dr. Yang Jwing-Ming teaches us how qigong exercises can directly support the immune system, how to enhance immunity, and qigong for immediate and long term immune health.

In this candid and personal video, Dr. Yang explains a crucial key of protecting your health by increasing your wei qi, also known as guardian energy or aura. He posits that many experiences we have in daily life can affect your bioelectric circulation, including the energetic properties of various foods and how the changing seasons can affect the quality of our immune response.

• Learn various breathing techniques that stimulate immunity

• Understand the importance of the girdle vessel for expanding energy

• Discover the function of your hormones in immunity

• Increase and store qi (energy) for boosting immunity

Master Yang discusses the importance of mind-body exercises for maintaining strong immunity health, and provides exercise examples from traditional healing arts, all filtered through the lens of the latest science.

Contents Include:

Introduction

How to Expand & Contract Your Qi

Qi Structure: Pumps, Chambers, Polarity

Two Minds: Conscious / Subconscious

Qi Network: 12 Meridians and 8 Vessels

Girdle Vessel and Dan Tians

Understand the Foundation / Q & A

Summary of Qigong Theory

Abdominal Breathing Details

Reverse Abdominal Breathing

Recognize Three Crucial Gates

Abdominal Circles

Bone Marrow and the Immune System

Boost Your Immune System – Short Term

• Turtle Shell Breathing

• Stimulate Skin

• Martial Fire / Belt

Condition Your Immune System – Long Term

• Reverse Abdominal Breathing

• Scholar Fire

• Embryonic Breathing Meditation

Qigong for Immune Health Q & A.

DVD comes with online streaming access. 

A fun workout for kids, with training tips for students, parents, and teachers

Kung Fu for Kids is an instructional program that teaches children the basics of traditional Kung Fu in a fun and exciting way. It starts with a simple, follow-along workout that introduces calisthenics and the basic stances, blocks, punches and kicks of martial arts using a kid’s curriculum. The activities end with a short cool-down routine to help children improve their balance, breathing, and mental focus.

This video features Kung Fu instructor Ben Warner, leading a group of children of different skill levels. Master instructor Nicholas Yang offers corrections to the students while they perform the varying routines.

Kids viewing the program at home get to follow along, see the corrections, and make their own adjustments.

Parents or older siblings are encouraged to join the workouts and help reinforce the simple corrections.

Dr. Yang, Jwing-Ming makes a cameo appearance to explain the meaning of the Shaolin sun-and-moon greeting.

A detail section is included with advanced students demonstrating the techniques in greater detail for refined study.

Later sections offer training tips for older students, parents, and teachers, including:

• Safety precautions to follow when practicing Kung Fu.
• Benefits and purpose of Kung Fu training for Kids.
• Appropriate time and place to use what has been learned.

The discipline and focus achieved through training Kung Fu extends to everyday activities in life, including academics, sports, music, and literature.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• Easy follow-along workout
• Cartoon interludes starring Shing (star)
• Interviews with Teachers and Parents About the Benefits of Kung Fu for Kids

This program is a real favorite for 7 - 12 year old kids, and parents of all ages too!

Also available: Kung Fu for Kids 2 DVD (young teens and tweens) a next-level workout.

Life on 1/10th the fossil fuels turns out to be awesome!

A new feature documentary about the most inspirational scientist in America.

Complementing the book Being the Change, this feature documentary film delves into the life of Caltech/Jet Propulsion Laboratory atmospheric scientist Peter Kalmus, showing how a change in life philosophy and mind frame enabled Kalmus to cut his fossil fuel use to 1/10th of the average American. All while boosting his happiness and raising a family in a typical California suburb.

In the film, Kalmus reveals how he stopped trying to convert climate change deniers with facts and figures and instead embarked upon a mission to become the change he wanted to see in the world. Along the way, Kalmus shows how he brought together his head (the science), his hands (food growing, bicycling, and lifestyle change), and heart (meditation and community building), to find new direction in his life.

Inspirational, hopeful, and doable by anyone, the message is clear: we can all change our minds and actions and live happier, more satisfying lives while reconnecting with ourselves, our communities, and the biosphere that sustains us all. And in the process we might just spark a climate revolution that truly changes everything.

Peter Kalmus is an atmospheric scientist at Caltech / Jet Propulsion Laboratory with a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University. He lives in suburban Altadena, California with his wife and two children on 1/10th the fossil fuels of the average American. Peter speaks purely on his own behalf, not on behalf of NASA or Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Mary Grandelis and Dave Davis, producers of El Cap Report and Allegheny Stories, have been making films together for over 20 years. They produce, write, direct, edit, and score all of their work. Recently they made the decision to align their work with their personal values and beliefs, leading them to pursue projects that serve as tools to help create a more just, equitable, and sustainable society.

January 1, 1994. The day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) comes into effect. A few minutes after midnight in Southeastern Mexico, several thousand Mayan soldiers take over half the state of Chiapas, declaring a war against the global corporate power they say rules Mexico. They call themselves the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN).

Zapatista is the definitive look at the uprising in Chiapas. It is the story of a Mayan peasant rebellion armed with sticks and their word against a first world military. It is the story of a global movement that has fought 175,000 federal troops to a stand still and transformed Mexican and international political culture forever.

Narration by: Mumia Abu-Jamal, Darryl Hannah, Edward James Olmos and Geronimo Pratt.

Featuring interviews with: Subcomandante Marcos, Noam Chomsky, Comandante Tacho, David and Zebedeo, Mayor Insurgente Ana Maria, Javier Elorriaga, Zach de la Rocha and more.

Music by Rage Against the Machine.

Special features include complete interviews with Subcomandante Marcos and Noam Chomsky, additional video shorts, action guide and photo slideshow.

Wisconsin Rising documents the largest sustained workers’ resistance movement in American history. Wisconsin was a testing ground for the nation in 2011 as big money attempted to undo basic workers’ rights when newly-elected Republican Governor Scott Walker suddenly stripped collective bargaining power from the state’s public employees.

Wisconsin Rising catapults the viewer into the days, weeks, and months when Wisconsinites fought back against power, authority, and injustice. Happening months before the Occupy movement, Wisconsinites spontaneously occupied their state Capitol for weeks as never before seen in American History.

As the story unfolds, democracy itself is at stake. The government in Wisconsin looks like a circus, as Republicans invent new laws daily, restricting citizens’—and even elected officials’—access to the State House. Our cameras are rolling on March 9th, 2011, when Republican Senators attempt to vote on the bill with no public notice as over 10,000 people pour into the Capitol, occupying its halls overnight. Dramatic footage shows Republican Senators fleeing the state capitol on a secret shuttle as thousands of Wisconsinites fill the State House and Capitol grounds in protest.

Collecting more than one million signatures, the people attempt to oust Scott Walker in a recall election. He is only the third governor in American history to face a recall election and is the first to survive.

What will the people of Wisconsin do in the face of these perceived injustices? How will the citizens rebuild and reorganize, and what can the rest of America learn from their actions?

DVD extras include interviews with Dennis Kucinich and Tom Morello.

Visions of Abolition is a new feature length documentary about the prison industrial complex and the prison abolition movement.

Part I, “Breaking down the Prison Industrial Complex” weaves together the voices of women caught in the criminal justice system and leading scholars of prison abolition, examining the racial and gendered violence of the prison system. Our film features the work of Susan Burton, a formerly incarcerated mother who established A New Way of Life, a group of transition homes for women coming home from prison in South Los Angeles (39 mins).

Part II, “Abolition: Past, Present, and Future” documents the recent history of the prison abolition movement through the organizing efforts of Critical Resistance and explores the meaning of abolitionist politics. By focusing on the collaboration between Critical Resistance and A New Way of Life, (known as the L.E.A.D. Project) the second half of the film unfolds a vision of abolition in practice (48 mins).

Interviews in the video include: Melissa Burch, Susan Burton, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Dylan Rodríguez, and Andrea Smith

Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out is a voyage into Latin America’s most exciting experiment of the new millennium, exploring the history and projects of the Bolivarian Revolution through interviews with a range of its participants, from academics to farm workers and those living in the margins of Caracas. This introduction to the “revolución bonita” (“pretty revolution”) offers in-depth interviews, unforgettable images and a lively soundtrack that will open new vistas onto this hopeful human project.

As he totes his camera on bus and car trips all over Venezuela, director Clifton Ross becomes our tour guide through the Bolivarian Revolution. He sweeps us through its history and takes us to its works-in-progress on the ground. These schools, rural lending banks and cooperatives weave the fabric of Venezuela’s “Socialism of the 21st Century.” They show its failures and successes, its warp and woof. Through it all runs the frayed but unbreakable thread of a people in struggle.

Extras Include: Meeting Chavez (10 minutes) and Message to the North American People (12 minutes).

Featuring: Dr. Steve Ellner, Universidad de Oriente, Puerto La Cruz; José Sant Roz, Universidad Socialista del Pueblo, Mérida; Jutta Schmitt, Universidad de los Andes, Mérida; Christene DeJong, Center for Latin American Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Roger Burbach, Director of the Center for the Study of the Americas, Berkeley, CA.

This Is What Democracy Looks Like, a co-production of the IMC and Big Noise Films, weaves the footage of over 100 videographers into a gripping document of what really happened on Seattle’s streets. The film cuts through the confusion and tear gas to paint an intimate, passionate portrait of a week that changed the world. With narration by Susan Sarandon and Spearhead’s Michael Franti, and with a driving soundtrack including Rage Against the Machine, DJ Shadow, DJ Musaka, and Company of Prophets, This Is What Democracy Looks Like is the first documentary to capture the raw energy of the WTO protests, while clarifying their global and historic significance.

The Independent Media Center provided a production infrastructure for over 450 media activists during the WTO protests in November 1999. With autonomous, volunteer-run media centers operating in four continents, ten countries and twenty-one cities, the IMC represents a new and powerful emerging model for independent media.

Special features include complete interviews with Subcomandante Marcos and Noam Chomsky, additional video shorts, action guide and photo slideshow.

Two of the most venerable figures on the American Left—Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky—converse with Sasha Lilley about their lives and political philosophies, looking back at eight decades of struggle and theoretical debate. Howard Zinn, interviewed shortly before his death, reflects on the genesis of his politics, from the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements to opposing empire today, as well as history, art, and activism. Noam Chomsky discusses the evolution of his libertarian socialist ideals since childhood, his vision for a future post-capitalist society, and his views on the state, science, the Enlightenment, and the future of the planet.

The War of 33 is an intimate, personal and powerful telling of the story of the 2006 war in Lebanon. A series of letters written by Hanady Salman—a mother living through the war in Beirut—carve a narrative arc through the intense and haunting images of conflict. She tells the stories of her family and the people she lives the war with—the refugees, the wounded, and the everyday Lebanese, struggling to maintain their sanity and their humanity during a time of war.

The War of 33 is more than a document of a particular historical experience. What emerges is a universal story—a complex picture of love, pain, resistance and survival in the face of uncertainty and violence.

The Rise of Disaster Capitalism features Naomi Klein explaining the ideas and research behind her bestselling book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In this riveting lecture and interview, Klein challenges and exposes the popular myth of the free market economy’s peaceful global victory

Around the world there are people with power who are cashing in on chaos, exploiting bloodshed and catastrophe to brutally implement their policies. They are the shock doctors. From Chile in 1973 to Iraq today, this is the chilling tale of how a few are making a killing while more are getting killed.

The author’s portion of the proceeds from the sale of the DVD are going to the UK non-profit organization War on Want.

The world’s most influential living intellectual, Noam Chomsky, holds forth on the root causes of the conflicts in the Middle East and talks about hopes for future social change. The renowned foreign policy critic and linguist brings the full force of his rapier-like mind and deadpan wit to bear in slicing through mainstream misconceptions—many of them intentional—about the internal and external politics of Iran and Israel/ Palestine. Chomsky eloquently contextualizes the power of the Israel lobby and the centrality of the U.S. in resolving the underlying antagonisms in the Middle East, as well as weighing in on how U.S. public opinion has shifted over the past several decades and addressing various positive directions for activism.

The Mafia Principle of Global Hegemony includes the hour long DVD extra of Noam Chomsky conversing with Larry Bensky about the media, class, and right wing populism.

Jena, LA - In a small town in Louisiana, six families are fighting for their sons' lives.

Two nooses are left as a warning to black students trying to integrate their playground, fights break out across town, a white man pulls a shotgun on black students, someone burns down most of the school, the DA puts six black students on trial for attempted murder,and the quiet town of Jena becomes the site of the largest civil rights demonstration in the South since the 1960s.

From the front-lines of conflicts in Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, Palestine, Korea, and the North; from Seattle to Genova, and the War on Terror in New York, Afghanistan, and Iraq, The Fourth World War is the story of men and women around the world who resist being annihilated in this war.

While our airwaves are crowded with talk of a new world war, narrated by generals and filmed from the noses of bombs, the human story of this global conflict remains untold. The Fourth World War brings together the images and voices of the war on the ground. It is a story of a war without end and of those who resist.

The product of over two years of filming on the inside of movements on five continents, The Fourth World War is a film that would have been unimaginable at any other moment in history. Directed by the makers of This Is What Democracy Looks Like and Zapatista, produced through a global network of independent media and activist groups, it is a truly global film from our global movement.

Narrated by Michael Franti and Suheir Hammad

The Angola 3: Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation tells the gripping story of Robert King, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, men who have endured solitary confinement longer than any known living prisoner in the United States. Politicized through contact with the Black Panther Party while inside Louisiana’s prisons, they formed one of the only prison Panther chapters in history and worked to organize other prisoners into a movement for the right to live like human beings. This feature length movie explores their extraordinary struggle for justice while incarcerated in Angola, a former slave plantation where institutionalized rape and murder made it known as one of the most brutal and racist prisons in the United States. The analysis of the Angola 3’s political work, and the criminal cases used to isolate and silence them, occurs within the context of the widespread COINTELPRO being carried out in the 1960’s and 70’s by the FBI and state law enforcement against militant voices for change.

In a partial victory, the courts exonerated Robert King of the original charges and released him in 2001; he continues the fight for the freedom of his two brothers. The ongoing campaign, which includes a civil case soon to come before the Supreme Court, is supported by people and organizations such as Amnesty International, the A.C.L.U., Harry Belafonte, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, Ramsey Clark, Sen. John Conyers, Sister Helen Prejean, (the late) Anita Roddick, Bishop Desmond Tutu and the ANC. Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox have now endured as political prisoners in solitary confinement for over thirty-five years.

Narrated by Mumia Abu-Jamal, The Angola 3 features interviews with former Panthers, political prisoners and revolutionaries, including the Angola 3 themselves, and Bo Brown, Geronimo (ji Jaga) Pratt, Malik Rahim, Yuri Kochiyama, David Hilliard, Rod Coronado, Noelle Hanrahan, Kiilu Nyasha, Marion Brown, Luis Talamantez, Gail Shaw and many others. Portions of the proceeds go to support the Angola 3. Features the music of Truth Universal written by Tajiri Kamau.

Extras include: ”Angola 3“ music video for a song written and produced by Dave Stewart (of the Eurythmics) in support of the A3 featuring Saul Williams, Nadirah X, Asdru Sierra, Dana Glover, Tina Schlieske and Derrick Ashong. Directed by Robin Davey. Plus a trailer for the film which features outtakes not in the feature.

“You can’t reform profit capitalism and inhumanity. Just kick it till it breaks.”
— Angry Brigade, communiqué.

Between 1970 and 1972, the Angry Brigade used guns and bombs in a series of symbolic attacks against property. A series of communiqués accompanied the actions, explaining the choice of targets and the Angry Brigade philosophy: autonomous organization and attacks on property alongside other forms of militant working class action. Targets included the embassies of repressive regimes, police stations and army barracks, boutiques and factories, government departments and the homes of Cabinet ministers, the Attorney General and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. These attacks on the homes of senior political figures increased the pressure for results and brought an avalanche of police raids. From the start the police were faced with the difficulty of getting to grips with a section of society they found totally alien. And were they facing an organization—or an idea?

This book covers the roots of the Angry Brigade in the revolutionary ferment of the 1960s, and follows their campaign and the police investigation to its culmination in the “Stoke Newington 8” conspiracy trial at the Old Bailey—the longest criminal trial in British legal history. Written after extensive research—among both the libertarian opposition and the police—it remains the essential study of Britain’s first urban guerilla group.

This expanded edition contains a comprehensive chronology of the “Angry Decade,” extra illustrations and a police view of the Angry Brigade. Introductions by Stuart Christie and John Barker (two of the “Stoke Newington 8” defendants) discuss the Angry Brigade in the political and social context of its times—and its longer-term significance.

Symbols of Resistance illuminates the untold stories of the Chican@ Movement with a focus on events in Colorado and New Mexico. The film engages student activists, the effect of police repression, and how issues of identity, land, and community still resonate in the Chican@ struggles of today. Through interviews with those who shaped the movement and rare historical footage, Symbols of Resistances offers a window into a dynamic moment in history and movement building.

Interviews include prominent Chicana leader Priscilla Falcón, activist lawyer Francisco “Kiko” Martínez, Mexican Liberation organizer Ricardo Romero, former director of El Pueblo History Museum Deborah Espinosa, and veteran reporter, photographer, and newspaper editor Juan Espinosa.

Closed captions and with Spanish subtitles.

Punk activist collective Positive Force DC emerged in 1985, rising from the creative, politically-charged ferment of DC punk’s Revolution Summer. Born in a dynamic local scene sparked by Bad Brains, Minor Threat, and Rites of Spring, a handful of young activists also drew inspiration from UK anarcho-punks Crass and the original “Positive Force” band Seven Seconds to become one of the most long-lasting and influential exponents of punk politics.

This feature-length film by Robin Bell skillfully mixes rare archival footage (including electrifying live performances from Fugazi, Bikini Kill, Rites of Spring, Nation of Ulysses, Anti-Flag, and more) with new interviews of key PF activists including co-founder Mark Andersen (co-author of Dance of Days) and Jenny Toomey (Simple Machines, Tsunami) as well as supporters such as Ian MacKaye, Jello Biafra, Dave Grohl, Ted Leo, Riot Grrrl co-founders Allison Wolfe and Kathleen Hanna, and many more. Covering a span of 30 years, More Than a Witness documents PF’s Reagan-era origins, the creation of its communal house, FBI harassment, and the rise of a vibrant underground that burst into the mainstream amid controversy over both the means and the ends of the movement.

Through it all, Positive Force has persisted, remaining deeply rooted in their hometown, reaching out to those in need and building bridges between diverse communities, while regularly bringing punk protest to the front doors of the powers-that-be. Encompassing an ever-evolving cast of characters, the all-volunteer group has helped to nurture several generations of activists. In the best punk fashion, PF has applied creative DIY tactics and radical critiques to issues of homelessness, hunger, racism, corporate globalization, sexism, homophobia, war, gentrification, and animal/earth liberation, while struggling to constructively address conflicting dynamics and visions within the group itself.

The filmmakers’ portion of the proceeds from the sale of the DVD will benefit the We Are Family senior outreach network.

Run time: 69 minutes.

Extras:

Wake Up! A Profile of Positive Force DC (28 minutes, 1991, a film by David Weinstein) A powerful snapshot of Positive Force at its early 90’s peak, just before the eruption of Riot Grrrl and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” with a special focus on the role of the PF communal house.

Green Hair, Grey Hair (28 minutes, 2008, a film by Katrina Taylor and Rachell Williams) Award-winning short documentary that spotlights the unlikely - but transformative - alliance between inner-city seniors and young punk rockers fostered by PF’s work with the “We Are Family” senior outreach network.

Punks, Votes, Riots (21 minutes, 2014, outtake from More Than a Witness)

Live at Positive Force (33 minutes) Bonus performances by Fugazi, Seven Seconds, Chumbawamba, Anti-Flag, Soulside, The Evens, and Beefeater.

In this glorious 2 DVD set, Britain’s finest living songwriters are captured live (on tour in Berkeley, CA), presenting two nights of their original songs, words, and inimitable performance.

Turning Silence into Song (Disc One) showcases a pair of career-spanning “greatest hits,“ with a suitable sprinkling of new and previously unreleased material. All introduced and contextualized with a large helping of trademark wit and dry irony.

The Liberty Tree (Disc Two) tells the story of Tom Paine’s extraordinary life, interweaving Paine’s own words, from his letters and the pamphlets which made him one of the most influential and dangerous writers of his age, with extracts from newspaper reports, diaries, letters, and other documents of the times. The songs of Robb Johnson and Leon Rosselson add another dimension to the story, reflecting Paine’s radical ideas and evaluating them in the context of the 21st century. This unique blend of words and music challenges received opinion in the same way Paine’s writings did.

Together, herein you’ll find over four hours of the finest contemporary songs, stories, humor, and observation from the greatest practitioners of the craft.

It is El Salvador, 1989, three years before the end of a brutal civil war that took 75,000 lives. Maria Serrano, wife, mother, and guerrilla leader is on the frontlines of the battle for her people and her country. With unprecedented access to FMLN guerrilla camps, the filmmakers dramatically chronicle Maria's daily life in the war as she travels from village to village organizing the peasant population, and helps plan a major nationwide offensive that led the FMLN into the historic peace pact of 1992. Skirting bullets and mortar attacks, recounting a childhood of poverty and abuse by government troops, suffering the tragic loss of her daughter to enemy fire, and spending precious moments with her husband and surviving daughters, Maria brings viewers to the heart of the fight for a more just society.

This critically acclaimed and award-winning film first aired on the PBS Documentary Series, P.O.V. in 1991. Revolutionary in its making, Maria’s Story broke ground as one of the first documentaries to use small format video. Traveling with only backpacks and solar powered batteries and living on the run with the guerrillas for two months, the filmmakers were able to capture otherwise unattainable footage. The resulting intimate portrait of Maria and her compatriots reveals a universal tale of love and survival in times of war.

Celebrating its 20th anniversary, the film is available for the first time on DVD. Included is an update of Maria Serrano and her family twenty years after the end of the civil war.

DVD contains both English and Spanish versions

Produced by Pamela Cohen and Catherine M. Ryan, Directed by Monona Wali and Pamela Cohen, Camera John Knoop, Featuring English Voiceovers by Alma Martinez and Edward James Olmos.

First Earth is about a massive paradigm shift for shelter—building healthy houses in the old ways, out of the very earth itself, and living together like in the old days, by recreating villages. An audiovisual manifesto filmed over four years on four continents, it proposes that earthen homes are the healthiest housing in the world; and that since it still takes a village to raise a healthy child, we must transform our suburban sprawl into eco-villages.

First Earth is not a how-to film, but a why-to film. It establishes the appropriateness of earthen building in every cultural context, under all socio-economic conditions, from third-world communities to first-world countryside, from Arabian deserts to American urban jungles. In the age of collapse and converging emergencies, the solution to many of our ills might just be getting back to basics, for material reasons and for spiritual reasons, both personal and political.

First Earth features curving art-poem dwellings in the Pacific Northwest in Canada and the US; thousand-year-old apartment-and-ladder architecture of Taos Pueblo; centuries-old and contemporary cob homes in England; classic round thatched huts in West Africa; bamboo-and-cob structures now on the rise in Thailand; and soaring Moorish-style earthen skyscrapers in Yemen. Featuring appearances by renowned cultural observers and activists Derrick Jensen, Daniel Quinn, James Howard Kunstler, Richard Heinberg, Starhawk, Chellis Glendinning, and Mark Lakeman as well as major natural building teachers Michael G. Smith, Becky Bee, Joseph Kennedy, Sunray Kelly, Janell Kapoor, Elke Cole, Ianto Evans, Bob Theis, and Stuart Cowan.

END:CIV examines our culture’s addiction to systematic violence and environmental exploitation, and probes the resulting epidemic of poisoned landscapes and shell-shocked nations. Based in part on Endgame, the best-selling book by Derrick Jensen, END:CIV asks: “If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air, and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?”

The causes underlying the collapse of civilizations are usually traced to overuse of resources. As we write this, the world is reeling from economic chaos, peak oil, climate change, environmental degradation, and political turmoil. Every day, the headlines re-hash stories of scandal and betrayal of the public trust. We don’t have to make outraged demands for the end of the current global system—it seems to be coming apart already.

But acts of courage, compassion and altruism abound, even in the most damaged places. By documenting the resilience of the people hit hardest by war and repression, and the heroism of those coming forward to confront the crisis head-on, END:CIV illuminates a way out of this all-consuming madness and into a saner future.

Backed by Jensen’s narrative, the film calls on us to act as if we truly love this land. The film trips along at a brisk pace, using music, archival footage, motion graphics, animation, slapstick and satire to deconstruct the global economic system, even as it implodes around us. END:CIV illustrates first-person stories of sacrifice and heroism with intense, emotionally-charged images that match Jensen’s poetic and intuitive approach. Scenes shot in the back country provide interludes of breathtaking natural beauty alongside clearcut evidence of horrific but commonplace destruction.

END:CIV features interviews with Paul Watson, Waziyatawin, Gord Hill, Michael Becker, Peter Gelderloos, Lierre Keith, James Howard Kunstler, Stephanie McMillan, Qwatsinas, Rod Coronado, John Zerzan, Steven Best, Aric McBay, George Poitras, Shusli, Zoe Blunt, Dru Oja Jay, Maya Rolbin-Ghanie, Shannon Walsh, Macdonald Stainsby, and Mike Mercredi.

Industrial civilization is devouring the planet and the future. The oceans are acidifying, whole mountains have been laid to waste, and the climate is teetering into chaos. Every biome is approaching collapse. And fifty years of environmentalism hasn’t even slowed the rate of destruction. Yet environmentalists are not considering strategies that might actually prevent the looming biocide we are facing.

Until Earth at Risk.

Earth at Risk: Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet is an annual conference featuring environmental thinkers and activists who are willing to ask the hardest questions about the seriousness of our situation. The conference is convened by Derrick Jensen, acclaimed author of Endgame, who has argued that we need a resistance movement against civilization itself.

The seven people in this film present an impassioned critique of the dominant culture from every angle: Thomas Linzey gives a fiery call for community sovereignty; Aric McBay discusses historically effective resistance strategies; and Stephanie McMillan takes down capitalism. One by one, they build an unassailable case that we need to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. These speakers offer their ideas on what can be done to build a real resistance movement, one that includes all levels of direct action—action that can actually match the scale of the problem. Earth at Risk includes Derrick Jensen, Arundhati Roy, Thomas Linzey, Waziyatawin, Aric McBay, Stephanie McMillan, and Lierre Keith. This collection is sure to inform, engage, and inspire.

Produced by Jai Jai Noire.

Deserter is the journey of Ryan and Jen Johnson--a deserting soldier and his young wife—as they flee across the country to seek refugee status over the Canadian border. As they move from safe house to safe house, we get to know Ryan and Jen—two, shy, small-town kids from the Central Valley who joined the military because there were no jobs, and find they must make a heroic stand in order to escape an illegal and immoral war. Deserter is a political road movie with one of the few happy endings that this war has given us.

Special Feature: Discussion with Amy Goodman and US Army Deserter Ryan Johnson at the North American premiere of Deserter.

On September 15, 2008, the United States fell into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The same day, we set out on a trip around the country to ask the American people what they had to say about it. In 2010, we went back to see how things had changed. The financial forecasters say the recession is over, but the reality is otherwise.

Their stories reveal desperation, indignation, hope, dreams and a disastrous economic breakdown; chaos generated by a system of inequality. But the financial meltdown is just one of several human rights crises now shaking the United States—in housing, education, health care, etc. The solutions to “Crossing the American Crises” are in the hands of the people.

Featuring the Vermont Worker’s Center, LA’s Bus Rider’s Union, Santa Fe’s local business Alliance, Oakland’s Green Jobs Now, Baltimore’s United Workers, New York’s Poverty Initiative, the U.S. Social Forum, and American workers, truck drivers, farmers, homeless, ex-felons, minorities, natural disaster survivors, indigenous, immigrants, and residents from coast to coast—covering nearly 40 states across the nation.

The talk was sponsored by the Brecht Forum and cosponsors included the Education Ministry of the Riverside Church, Mission and Social Justice Commission of the Riverside Church, Theatre of the Oppressed at the Riverside Church, the Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory, and Bluestockings Books.

More than 2,000 people attended the lecture captured here, in which Chomsky offered a powerful analysis of the current economic crisis and its structural roots, the continuity in U.S. foreign policy under the Barack Obama administration, and the class interests driving U.S. domestic and foreign policy. He also speaks at length about the tradition of worker self-management as a concrete alternative to the business-as-usual approach of corporations and the government during the current crisis. The DVD also features an introduction by Amy Goodman and an exclusive one-on-one interview with Chomsky.

COINTELPRO 101 exposes illegal surveillance, disruption, and outright murder committed by the U.S. government in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. “COINTELPRO” refers to the official FBI COunter INTELligence PROgram carried out to surveil, imprison, and eliminate leaders of social justice movements and to disrupt, divide, and destroy the movements as well. Many of the government’s crimes are still unknown. Through interviews with activists who experienced these abuses first-hand and with rare historical footage, the film provides an educational introduction to a period of intense repression and draws relevant lessons for present and future movements.

Interviews in the video include:

• Muhammad Ahmad (Max Stanford), Founder of Revolutionary Action Movement, author of We Will Return In The Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations 1960–1975.
• Bob Boyle, Attorney representing many activists and political prisoners targeted by COINTELPRO.
• Kathleen Cleaver, former leader of the Black Panther Party, now Professor of Law at Emory and Yale Universities, and co-editor of Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy.
• Ward Churchill, co-author of The COINTELPRO Papers and Agents of Repression.
• Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Native American activist and author of Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years 1960–1975.
• Priscilla Falcon, Mexicana activist and professor whose husband was assassinated for his leadership in the Chicano struggle.
• Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt, former leader of the Black Panther Party who was falsely imprisoned for 27 years in a COINTELPRO case.
• Jose Lopez, Director of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago and long-time advocate of Puerto Rican independence.
• Francisco “Kiko” Martinez, Chicano/Mexicano activist and attorney.
• Lucy Rodriguez, Puerto Rican Independentista and former Political Prisoner
• Ricardo Romero, Chicano/Mexicano activist and Grand Jury resister
• Akinyele Umoja, African American History scholar at Georgia State University.
• Laura Whitehorn, radical activist and former political prisoner who was targeted by the federal government.

Subtitles in Spanish by Tlaxcala, the international network of translators for linguistic diversity.

Two documentaries about punk-ska band Citizen Fish who live in South West England and spend large chunks of life playing their one-off brand of music to people who don’t. Bassist Jasper takes his video camera in and out of tour vans and people’s faces along the way—and this is what it looks and sounds like: clips of interviews, scenery, gigs, people, music and ‘things that happen’, meshed together to give a wide-angle picture of a band on (and off) tour.

Underwater Overground is the new film (2008) about the further adventures of the band as they tour in the UK, the USA and Europe. Jasper has been busy again with his video camera as the band toured England and Wales, the USA (four different tours), the Czech Republic and Poland, with other bands including Leftover Crack, Sainte Catherines, Witch Hunt, Intro5pect, Prague Ska Conspiracy, MDC and Subhumans. (63 min)

Gaffer Tape was the original film (2000). Using footage from throughout the band’s history, it includes Poland in 1994, Australia and New Zealand in 1997, America, from New York to San Francisco, in September 1999 and Winchester to France in 1999–2000. (48 min)

Extras Include:

• 10 live songs from 1990–2008 (32 min)
• 2007 Broadcast from BBC Radio 1 Punk Show with Mike Davies (8 min)
• Gaffer Tape trailer (2 min)
• Underwater Overground trailer (2 min)
• Citizen Fish Oddities! (4 min)

In 1994, the Latin Kings—the largest and most powerful street gang in New York—became the Latin King and Queen Nation. They claimed to have abandoned their criminal past and to be following in the footsteps of the Black Panthers and the Young Lords.

With over 3,000 members in New York, some saw the Latin King and Queen Nation as the most important political voice to rise from the streets in decades. The NYPD did not agree, calling them a vicious gang with a PR campaign. One thing is certain, the City was never the same after the Nation went downtown.

In 1997 Big Noise films became the only media group ever given unrestricted access to the Nation. For two years they ran with the Kings and Queens in New York City, filming on the front lines of their everyday struggle for survival. Black and Gold explores a reality that is too often reduced to a stereotype or a slogan. Its unblinking lens puts you at the center of a complex and controversial movement.

The Nation was one of the major forces that made police violence and the prison system political issues in New York City. But from the beginning the NYPD has questioned the sincerity of the Nation’s political involvement, and has systematically worked to dismantle what they see as the most dangerous street gang in the City. Their efforts culminated in a spectacular midnight raid on May 15, 1998 when over 1,000 Federal and City agents simultaneously raided homes across the city making over 100 arrests in what was the largest coordinated FBI action since prohibition.

Black and Gold lets you feel the tension inside the movement as it comes under fire from midnight police raids and assassination attempts. In the end it shows us both the black and the gold—both the fear and violence of the street and the fierce love inside the most dangerous movement in the City. Extras include full length interviews with King Tone and Puerto Rican revolutionary Richie Perez.

Wars crush our humanity. Defeats splinter our movements. Corporate media turns a blind eye to our mounting crises and a cynical one to the people who stand up against them. Against a tide of ignorance, isolation and cynicism, Big Noise Dispatches take you around the world to look war and crisis in the face, but also to witness a shared struggle for survival and dignity in this time of violence.

Inside reporting from war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq; and domestic stories on the stepped up military recruitment of Latinos and the FBI’s use of paid informants to entrap Muslims.

• COIN's Last Stand
  The Marjah offensive was supposed to demonstrate that victory is still possible in Afghanistan. Instead it has revealed a counterinsurgency campaign in crisis. (7 min)
• Enduring Presence
  The U.S. celebrates the end of combat in Iraq, but has no plans to withdraw its thousands of Special Operations Forces and mercenaries or its “Enduring Presence Posts.” (5 min)
• Yo Soy El Army
  The U.S. military is stepping up its recruitment of Latinos. Latinos enter into the lowest and most dangerous ranks, and have been disproportionately killed in America's latest wars. (26 min)
• Million Dollar Militia
  Will America’s new tribal strategy in Afghanistan bring stability, or is it building “Million Dollar Tribal Militias” that will further undermine a weak Afghan state? (22 min)
• Entrapped
  A Democracy Now! investigation with Anjali Kamat into the use of paid informants in high profile "homegrown terror" cases. Is the FBI foiling terror plots or targeting and entrapping Muslims in America? (34 min)

Wars crush our humanity. Defeats splinter our movements. Corporate media turns a blind eye to our mounting crises and a cynical one to the people who stand up against them. Against a tide of ignorance, isolation and cynicism, Big Noise Dispatches take you around the world to look war and crisis in the face, but also to witness a shared struggle for survival and dignity in this time of violence.

Jeremy Scahill investigates Blackwater's role in the Nisur Square massacre, Greg Palast tracks American debt speculators to Liberia, Big Noise goes inside the resurgent white power movement in America, and we visit East St. Louis.

• Blackwater's Youngest Victim
  Jeremy Scahill's exclusive report on the last man standing between Blackwater and impunity for the mercenary company's role in the massacre of Iraqi civilians in Nisur Square, Iraq. (22 min)
• Vulture Funds Attack Liberia
  Greg Palast travels to Liberia to uncover a scam by American debt speculators to take millions from one of the poorest countries on the planet. But when we showed up to ask them about it at their office in New York, it seemed to have. . . disappeared. (7min)
• White Power USA
  From skinheads to border militias to the right wing of the "Tea Party Movement", Big Noise takes a disturbing inside look at the resurgence of white nationalism in America. (22 min)
• East St. Louis
  Can residents of East St. Louis save their town? Or has it become obsolete - a warning to all American cities facing de-industrialization? (26 min)

Ground breaking reports from the turmoil in Iraq to convention protests and election fraud in the US.

The reports from Iraq were made with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and originally aired on Al Jazeera English.

• Beyond the Wall: Inside the Sadr Movement in Iraq
  After a US and Iraqi military campaign, the armed Shiite resistance melted away from the street. We go behind the wall is Sadr City to discover the fate of the Mehdi Army, and the state of the fight for Iraq’s future. (21 min)
• Re-Awakening Saddam’s Tribal Strategy
  The US is reconstituting the tribal elite Saddam used to run the country. But will it be able to maintain the delicate balance between the Sunni “Awakening” militias and the Shiite government? (21 min)
• The Detention Imperative: An Inside Look at the US Detention System in Iraq
  Few American institutions affect the lives of ordinary Iraqis more directly and profoundly than the US detention system. But once Iraqis are swept up in the system, there is no clear way out. (21 min)
• Breaking with Convention
  Quick, ragged clips produced for Democracy Now!'s daily coverage of the Democratic and Republican Conventions. (65 min)
• Election Suppression
  Big Noise teams up with journalist Greg Palast on this BBC investigation of the suppression of the vote in the 2008 elections. (14min)

From the front lines in Iraq, to the legal lynching in Jena, LA, to the growth of a new poor people's movement in the streets of Philadelphia and Nashville—Dispatches 02 takes you where the mainstream media cannot go.

• The Ghost Of Anbar: The US military is creating and funding Sunni militias in Iraq. Are they “freedom fighters,” or sectarian war criminals arming themselves for a Sunni-Shia civil war? (20 min)
• The Jena 6: Big Noise news report from the legal lynching in Jena LA, where six black students face life in prison for a schoolyard fight. (12 min)
• Homeless Power!: While the economy unravels and the gap widens between rich and poor, we look at the rise of a new poor people's movement in America. (12 min)
• Vulture Battle: Big Noise teams up once again with investigative reporter Greg Palast, following up on their report on debt speculators who are taking millions from the world's poorest countries. (10 min)

Wars crush our humanity. Defeats splinter our movements. Corporate media turns a blind eye to our mounting crises and a cynical one to the people who stand up against them.

Against a tide of ignorance, isolation and cynicism, Big Noise Dispatches take you around the world to look war and crisis in the face, but also to witness a shared struggle for survival and dignity in this time of violence.

• Return of the Warlords
  Afghanistan’s most notorious warlord is back—at the invitation of the president. Karzai hails his warlord allies as national heroes, but what does their return to political prominence mean for Afghan democracy? (21 min)
• Curveball
  Six years into a disastrous war in Iraq, stories have emerged about a staggeringly incompetent pre-war intelligence effort that got nearly everything wrong. . . but the truth is much more troubling. (21 min)
• Broke Down in Motor City
  Detroit was once the epicenter of American industry. Today, it is a city in crisis. Broke Down in Motor City is the story of this crisis, and of the people fighting to save their homes and their city. (21 min)
• The Continuing Occupation
  As the American occupation grinds on, Iraq remains in ruins, with over 1 million dead and 4 to 6 million refugees who have not begun to return home. How did the occupation turn into this, and what went wrong? (10 min)

Against a tide of ignorance, isolation and cynicism, Big Noise Dispatches take you around the world to look war and crisis in the face, but also to witness a shared struggle for survival and dignity.

Dispatches 01 collects 72 minutes of radical investigations, analysis and on the ground video from the Big Noise team working on four continents.

• Reconstructing Jihad: Israel’s July War destroyed 130,000 homes and created 1 million refugees but failed to defeat Hezballah. The next phase of the struggle is Hezballah’s race to rebuild its southern stronghold. (14 min)
• The Other Campaigns: Multibillionaire Carlos Slim and the guerrilla leader Subcomandante Marcos are facing off in the struggle between the Mexico above and the Mexico below. (15 min)
• Goldfinger: Big Noise and investigative reporter Greg Palast unmask “Vulture Funds”—debt speculators who are taking millions from the world’s poorest countries. (12 min)
• World Bank Famine: 800,000 children face starvation in Niger, but activists say the famine is not caused by drought—it was caused by 20 years of structural adjustment programs. (5 min)
• It’s The Oil Stupid: Big Noise and investigative reporter Greg Palast meet with President Chavez in a look at Latin America’s Oil Superpower and the “New Latin America.” (11 min)
• Mexican Election Fraud: Big Noise and investigative reporter Greg Palast uncover blatant fraud in the right wing’s come-from-behind presidential victory. (15 min)

Wars crush our humanity. Defeats splinter our movements. Corporate media turns a blind eye to our mounting crises, and a cynical one to the people who stand up against them.

Against a tide of ignorance, isolation and cynicism, Big Noise Dispatches take you around the world to look war and crisis in the face, but also to witness a shared struggle for survival and dignity.

• The Battle For Basra: An inside look at the battle between Iraq’s three largest Shiite parties over control of the city that taps most of Iraq’s oil wealth. (16 min)
• New Orleans: Man-Made Disaster: The hundreds who died here were not killed by the storm—they were left for days to drown as floodwaters rose around them. And today, the storm isn't what's keeping most of the city's former residents from returning home. (26 min)
• Iran: Elections Under Threat: A unique glimpse into the political dynamics of the struggles for participation and democracy in a nation facing increasing economic and military threats from the United States. (21 min)
• Chevron/Texaco Vs. The Rainforest: Big Noise teams up with investigative journalist Greg Palast, traveling into Ecuador's Amazon rainforest to take a look at the biggest environmental case in history. (13 min)
• Winter Soldier: 5 years into the war in Iraq, there is no end in sight. 200 US soldiers meet outside of Washington DC, sharing first-hand accounts of the war on the ground and the growing GI resistance movement. (30 min)

What is democracy? Freedom, equality, participation? Everyone has his or her own definition. Across the world, 120 countries now have at least the minimum trappings of democracy—the freedom to vote for all citizens. But for many, this is just the beginning not the end. Following decades of US-backed dictatorships, civil wars and devastating structural adjustment policies in the South, and corporate control, electoral corruption, and fraud in the North, representative politics in the Americas is in crisis. Citizens are now choosing to redefine democracy under their own terms: local, direct, and participatory.

In 1989, the Brazilian Worker’s Party altered the concept of local government when they installed participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, allowing residents to participate directly in the allocation of city funds. Ten years later, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was swept into power with the promise of granting direct participation to the Venezuelan people; who have now formed tens of thousands of self-organized communal councils. In the Southern Cone, cooperative and recuperated factory numbers have grown, and across the Americas social movements and constitutional assemblies are taking authority away from the ruling elites and putting power into the hands of their members and citizens.

Featuring interviews with: Eduardo Galeano, Amy Goodman, Emir Sader, Martha Harnecker, Ward Churchill, and Leonardo Avritzer as well as cooperative and community members, elected representatives, academics, and activists from Brazil, Canada, Venezuela, Argentina, United States, Uruguay, Chile, Colombia, and more

Beyond Elections is a journey that takes us across the Americas to attempt to answer one of the most important questions of our time: What is democracy?

Extras include video, audio, and resource materials on participatory democracy.