Tag Archives: human rights

Disaster Capitalism

DISASTER CAPITALISM reveals the underbelly of the global aid and investment industry. It’s a complex web of interests that spans the earth from powerful nations and multinational corporations to tribal and village leaders. This documentary offers unique insights into a multi-billion dollar world by investigating how aid dollars are spent.

Best-selling journalist and author Antony Loewenstein joins award-winning filmmaker Thor Neureiter on a six-year investigation into this world and the ramifications of disaster capitalism in Afghanistan, Haiti and Papua New Guinea. There are ideological, economic, political and corporate connections between all three states.

Told through Loewenstein’s eyes and with compelling local characters, we weave them together to show viewers the dark side of Western aid. How did we get here? How can it change and who is leading it? What role and responsibility lies with Western governments? As the long-term journey unfolds, DISASTER CAPITALISM will provide unique insight into one of the most challenging issues of our age.

Ask no Questions

When Chinese state TV blames his faith for a fiery public suicide, Chen Ruichang is detained in a Clockwork Orange-style brainwashing facility and forced to accept the government’s account. But Chen, a former insider of the state TV himself, believes it was a government plot. A CNN reporter smuggled out footage of the event that day but was muzzled by Beijing. Now her eyewitness testimony helps untangle an intricate conspiracy, as Chinese authorities pressure the filmmaker’s family and business associates. Ask No Questions shows the deadly power of media under authoritarian control. It also shows the remarkable power of an individual who refuses to compromise the truth.

The Dirty War on the NHS

John Pilger’s documentary, The Dirty War on the NHS, “goes to the heart of the struggle for democracy today”, he says. Britain’s National Health Service, the NHS, was the world’s first universal public health service.

Designed to give millions of people “freedom from fear”, the NHS today is under threat of being sold off and converted to a free market model inspired by America’s disastrous health insurance system, which results in the death every year of an estimated 45,000 people. President Trump said the NHS is “on the table” in any future trade deal with America. Filmed in Britain and the United States, this timely, compelling documentary touches us all and reveals what may be the last battle to preserve the most fundamental human right.

Utopia: How the First Australians are being Decimated

Utopia is John Pilger’s feature documentary, made for the cinema and ITV. Drawing on his long association with the first people of Australia, his homeland, Utopia is both an epic portrayal of the oldest continuous human culture and an investigation into a suppressed colonial past and rapacious present. One of the world’s best-kept secrets is revealed against a background of the greatest boom in mineral wealth. Has the ‘lucky country’ inherited South African apartheid? Utopia tells a universal story of power and resistance in the media age driven by old imperatives and presented as liberalism.

Broken Harmony: China’s Dissidents

Broken Harmony: China’s Dissidents tells the story of Hua Ze, an ordinary Chinese citizen for whom a discovery of corruption led her into a hidden world of dissidents, citizen journalism, police harassment and kidnappings.

Once a mild mannered TV director, Hua Ze discovered that an old friend reporting on alleged corruption after the Sichuan earthquake had disappeared, along with any mention of him online. Following a trail of leads over the great internet fire wall of China, she discovers not just the fate of her friend, but the truth behind Sichuan’s fatal building code violations, a jaw-dropping array of human rights abuses across China and comes to the realization that the entire internet in China is a state controlled fiction.

Hua’s awakening takes her into a new world of dissidents, journalists and human rights lawyers. As she begins her own reporting, pressure from the government is swift, and her world is turned upside down. She is forced out of her job and placed under surveillance. One by one, her new friends are arrested or detained. Phones are tapped and secretive threats and warnings are made. But Hua cannot turn a blind eye to the corruption and she pays the price.

When ordinary Chinese citizens go to extraordinary lengths to fight human rights abuses, the risks are enormous, even life-threatening. Broken Harmony reveals Hua’s courageous acts and willingness to lose everything to fight for justice and the rule of law.

How Colonial-Era Laws Still Punish Gay People

A set of laws known as the penal code was exported from Britain to its colonies and is still affecting LGBTQ politics to this very day.

The penal code laws made being gay a criminal offence, and while Britain decriminalized homosexuality in 1967, it’s still illegal in over 30 former British colonies.

These countries didn’t have a history of homophobia before Britain enforced their own ideas of morality, but thanks to the empire these laws mean many live in fear. Zing Tsjeng investigates how the legacy of the empire is still ruining lives to this day.