Performing Arts

Inform yourself! Inform on your neighbor!

Follow Special Agent Christian White on a cheerfully creepy tour of declassified government surveillance documents. White probes the redacted (blacked-out) texts of the FBI’s notorious Counterintelligence Programs, searching for the words erased in the name of the Freedom of Information Act.

Learn fun techniques for the infiltration of activist groups, how to earn benefits and a pension as an agent provocateur, and how to, in the words of J. Edgar Hoover, “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” your neighbors!

These are our tax dollars at work, folks; we might as well enjoy it.

This script has been performed by writer/activist L.M. Bogad in theatres, galleries, labor halls, and community centers for the past twelve years. The pamphlet also includes a preface by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and a companion essay by Bogad about the history of domestic surveillance/harassment, and a “how to” for would-be performers of the script.

Back by popular demand, this new Second Edition adds photos of the original COINTELPRO documents used in the show. There are also many updates to the script: more information, more character development, and more and better jokes, all in the darkly humorous style of the original.

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.

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.

“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 documentary, produced by Gordon Carr for the BBC (and first shown in January 1973, shortly after the trial), 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. Produced after extensive research—among both the libertarian opposition and the police—it remains the essential study of Britain’s first urban guerilla group.

Extra: The Persons Unknown (1980, 22 minutes)
The so-called “Persons Unknown” case in which members of the Anarchist Black Cross were tried (and later acquitted) at the Old Bailey on charges of “conspiring with persons unknown, at places unknown, to cause explosions and to overthrow society.” Featuring interviews and footage of Stuart Christie, Nicholas Walter, Crass and many other UK anarchist activists and propagandists of the time.

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)

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 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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960–1990 examines how political violence and resistance was represented in arthouse and cult films from 1960 to 1990.

This historical period spans the Algerian war of independence and the early wave of post-colonial struggles that reshaped the Global South, through the collapse of Soviet Communism in the late ‘80s. It focuses on films related to the rise of protest movements by students, workers, and leftist groups, as well as broader countercultural movements, Black Power, the rise of feminism, and so on. The book also includes films that explore the splinter groups that engaged in violent, urban guerrilla struggles throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as the promise of widespread radical social transformation failed to materialize: the Weathermen, the Black Liberation Army and the Symbionese Liberation Army in the United States, the Red Army Faction in West Germany and Japan, and Italy’s Red Brigades.

Many of these movements were deeply connected with and expressed their values through art, literature, popular culture, and, of course, cinema. Twelve authors, including academics and well know film critics, deliver a diverse examination of how filmmakers around the world reacted to the political violence and resistance movements of the period and how this was expressed on screen. This includes looking at the financing, distribution, and screening of these films, audience and critical reaction, the attempted censorship or suppression of much of this work, and how directors and producers eluded these restrictions.

Including over two hundred illustrations, the book examines filmmaking movements like the French, Japanese, German, and Yugoslavian New Waves; subgenres like spaghetti westerns, Italian poliziotteschi, Blaxploitation, and mondo movies; and films that reflect the values of specific movements like feminists, Vietnam War protesters, and Black militants. The work of influential and well-known political filmmakers such as Costa-Gavras, Gillo Pontecorvo, and Glauber Rocha is examined side by side with grindhouse cinema and lessor known titles by a host of all-but forgotten filmmakers, including many from the Global South, that are deserving of rediscovery.