Can one goofball change the world on his own? Maybe. But it's easier with a party.
A series of BBC films about how humans have been colonised by the machines we have built. Although we don't realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers. The series argues this has affected a wide spectrum of human institutions and studies, from American economic theory, to environmental policy, and governmental philosophy. Filmmaker Adam...
Greening Sacred Spaces is a practical programme developed by Faith & the Common Good to assist faith communities with both the educational and spiritual dimensions of greening as well as the "how-to" side of audits, retrofits and generally reducing the faith community's footprint. We have developed a whole resource kit – with workshops, posters, music, and more– to help faith...
“Change the Media, Change the World” was the theme at the National Conference for Media Reform in Boston last weekend. But if it didn’t sound like a self-help book from the bargain bin, we could have added “Change Yourself.” Because we all walked away a little changed, didn’t we? So much of the work we do to change the media happens online, or in our own...
A dangerous thing can occur when you start learning about what's really going on in the world. The problems start to seem so complex, and you're just one person, doubts begin to creep in. You sincerely want to help change the world, but from all this knowledge you start to believe that the world is too out of control and too big to change, so you end up not doing anything. What aspiring...
Oo-de-lally !! After twelve months in development, the site has finally gone live! What started out as a simple plan a year ago to make a few minor visual tweaks and navigational changes ended up morphing into an over-the-top, head-to-toe redesign of the entire site. It's been an epic adventure of long nights, coffee, and dreams of the day we'll someday be done, but the day has arrived...
Films For Action's City Chapter websites aim to provide a definitive web-based resource for the activist community of that city. By providing a robust set of information and communication tools geared to amplify the impact of local efforts, the website serves to build synergy and momentum to affect dramatic and radical change at a city-wide level. We believe an informed, well connected, and...
With a growing awareness of mounting ecological, economic, and social problems, there exists many growing currents of response. On one hand, more people are waking up. They're getting involved. They're saying, "Not another day! This is where I mark the line." Their desire to change the world is turning from simple wishful thinking on Monday mornings into tangible action. The thoughts they...
It's been five years since the Films For Action project began in Lawrence, Kansas. It started with one simple idea: we can't depend on the mainstream media to inform us, so let's become the media ourselves by hosting documentaries on issues that the corporate media ignores. Over the years we 've hosted over 30 film screenings, launched a website that has attracted over 380,000...
Arianna Huffington has betrayed us, so let's huff and puff her house down. She built a blog-empire on the backs of thousands of citizen journalists. She exploited our idealism and let us labor under the illusion that that the Huffington Post was different, independent and leftist. Now she's cashed in and three thousand indie bloggers find themselves working for a megacorp. But the...
Last night, in what seems to be part of a coordinated crackdown on occupations across the country, Zuccotti Park was raided. Thousands of us who had subscribed to the text alert system, or who got emails or phone calls or panicked Twitter messages, went to Wall Street. But we could not get near the camp. Two blocks south of Liberty Plaza on Broadway, blocked by a police barricade that circled...
A radical situation is a collective awakening. . . . In such situations people become much more open to new perspectives, readier to question previous assumptions, quicker to see through the usual cons. . . . People learn more about society in a week than in years of academic “social studies” or leftist “consciousness raising.” . . . Everything seems possible &mdash...
The book you're holding carries a message that your first instinct will be to distrust. That message is, We can change the world. It's risky these days to make such a promise because it sounds like one of those meaningless "awaken the inner giant" - type bromides: If you can dream it, you can do it," "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step," and so on. But it's true...
Here's a big idea: Pangea Day plans to use the power of film to bring the world a little closer together. We're divided by borders, race, religion, conflict... but most of all by misunderstanding and mistrust. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that -- to help people see themselves in others -- through the power of film.
A weekly free bike coop where you can use mechanics’ tools and expertise to fix your bike? Free clinics where schoolkids or neighbors learn to maintain or build their own bikes from used parts? Chauncey and Dash Tudhope-Locklear make a living repairing bicycles, but volunteer projects support their mission of empowering “social change through bicycles.” With an eye to local...
CREATING COMMUNITY: (Above) Chris O’Donnell, 24, of Bushwick, Brooklyn, takes a break at the Occupy Wall Street encampment. The kitchen has been serving free meals to as many as 1,000 people a day. (Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales) “Who is ready to defend our park?” the speaker shouted. It was 6 a.m. and thousands of us filled the Occupy Wall Street camp under a...
2011 will likely be remembered in America as the year that the nation's youth finally started to wake up - all that bubbling knowledge of the world's problems, all the discontent and disillusion with our broken system finally burst into a flurry of creative action. Our understandings of the deep, structural flaws in our economy, politics and culture reached new heights of collective awareness...
One of the most entertaining yet unsurprising aspects of Occupy Wall St has been the response from traditional media. Whether intentionally playing dumb or genuinely clueless, the mainstream media has failed to inform the public and substantially address the key issues. But why did tens of thousands of people risk arrest all over the world to set up encampments and protest the status quo?...
Will you survive the transition of human industrial civilization happening now due to peak oil and climate change? Can you see the forest for the trees, the earth for the dream, the universe for the seed? Anima Mundi is an innovative documentary about the planetary animal called Gaia and the human animal we deny, we deny at our own peril, yet a peril that is perfect in design.
Lawrence, KS -- After 12 months in development, Films For Action has launched its new website - a head-to-toe redesign that lays the foundation for a vibrant community-powered news site dedicated to inspiring positive social change. At the heart of the new site is a constantly growing learning library of over 200 documentaries and 500 short films that can be watched free online, daily...
The main purpose of this book is to try to persuade revolutionaries to shift the sites of the anticapitalist struggle and to select new battlefields. I identify three strategic sites for fighting - neighborhoods, workplaces, and households - that I believe will not only enable us to defeat capitalists but also to build a new society in the process. The advantage of this shift is that it...
All over the globe people are rising up and demanding their rights in a worldwide rally of discontent as over 1,500 protests inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement spread around the world on Saturday, October 15th.
Peter Joseph, founder of the Zeitgeist Movement, addresses Occupy Wall St, offering thoughts on the Media, Violence & Solutions going forward. Please share. The Revolution is Now.
Worried about our planet? Do the old political systems seem broken beyond repair? Can you imagine the joy of discovering we don't need to keep knocking our heads against the wall inside a broken political system? Remember Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz? She kept struggling to get the mighty wizard to save her, when all along the power was right inside. All she had to do was click her heels...
A short film on GM crops.
In every corner of the globe, we are polluting, diverting, pumping, and wasting our limited supply of fresh water at an expediential level as population and technology grows. The rampant overdevelopment of agriculture, housing and industry increase the demands for fresh water well beyond the finite supply, resulting in the desertification of the earth. Corporate giants force developing...
Advertising & the End of the World features an illustrated presentation by Sut Jhally of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the producer and writer of the award-winning Dreamworlds series. Part 2 is a 60 minute un-illustrated presentation by Sut Jhally on the same theme. Focusing directly on the world of commercial images, he asks some basic questions about the cultural...
Episode 1 – The Battle Begins In the 1970s the world seemed to be falling apart. From acid rain to overpopulation, ecological concerns were at the fore. And it was at this time that climate change first became a hot political issue. But it wasn’t global warming that frightened scientists, it was the complete opposite; a new ice age.Dr Iain Stewart traces the history of climate...
350 is the most important number in the world. This number is the safe line for our global climate and a start line for a global movement. Join 350.org to take action in your community, engage our world's leaders, and build an international movement to solve the climate crisis. Visit http://www.350.org to join the movement.
In order to examine the true effects of globalization, renowned journalist John Pilger turns the spotlight on Indonesia, a country described by the World Bank as a model pupil until its globalized economy collapsed in 1998. The film examines the use of sweatshop factories by famous brand names, and asks some penetrating questions. Who are the real beneficiaries of the globalized economy? Who...
The arms industry is considered so important by the Brittish government that it consumes almost half of all research and development funds. Strangely it produces not consumer goods that people want, but machines that hardly any of us use or want to use. Moreover, for all its' preeminence, its' future is uncertain and depends to a large degree on secret deals with some of the most corrupt and...
Mycologist Paul Stamets breaks down many of the discoveries he's made studying mycelium -- and lists 6 ways that this astonishing fungus can help save the world.
I can think of no greater hell on earth than spending day after day in a little box. What about non-violent offenders? The drug addicts, the bad check writers, the people that are filling up our jails and costing us money? The number of prisoners in prisons for drugs equals the total number of prisoners in 1980! The good news: in the past 20 years spending for higher education has increased...
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...
Rob Hopkins reminds us that the oil our world depends on is steadily running out. He proposes a unique solution to this problem -- the Transition response, where we prepare ourselves for life without oil and sacrifice our luxuries to build systems and communities that are completely independent of fossil fuels. This talk was recorded in November 2009. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the...
"Other Worlds is an intriguing and well-lensed first-person introduction to the parallel universe that some Amazonian indigenous peoples consider to be ‘reality.’ Jan Kounen (Blueberry) went through more than 100 sacred-plant elixir sessions with a shaman during four years. Blending talking heads with heady imagery, film makes an excellent case for the meeting up of contemporary...
Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are two guys who just can't take "no" for an answer. They have an unusual hobby: posing as top executives of corporations they hate. Armed with nothing but thrift-store suits, the Yes Men lie their way into business conferences and parody their corporate targets in ever more extreme ways - basically doing everything that they can to wake up their audiences to...
Riz Khan talks to John Perkins about his book on global corruption. Perkin's book, entitled "Confessions of an Economic Hit man," was on the New York Times best seller list when it was first published in 2004. "Economic hit men," John Perkins writes, "are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial...
Sometimes pictures speak more loudly than statistics. This short video collage compares and contrasts the living conditions between two very different types of cultures in the world.
The film, narrated by Peter and produced and directed by Tom and Barbara Burstyn, features Peter Proctor of New Zealand, the father of bio-dynamic agriculture. The documentary highlights his journey throughout India helping farmers revive their poisoned soil. Various activists, politicians and farmers are interviewed about the deep economic, social and environmental consequences in the...
Excellent documentary showing how dangerous Aspartame - an artificial sweetener in most diet products - is to human health. From its history, to its effects this video is enough to shock anyone into really looking at their food labels next time they shop. Aspartame is a toxic food that came into the world as an investment By Donald Rumsfeld, while ignoring the deadly effects the tests showed...
Afsan Chowdhury is a journalist and communications development expert based in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Toronto, Canada. Director of the film "Climate Change - Does Anybody Care if Bangladesh Drowns?," he is also Director of Advocacy and Human Rights at The Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. Afsan is a member of the Board of Directors of IWT.
Occasionally the mainstream news will report on something relevant, though notice this is CNN International, not CNN as broadcast in America. Oh and wasn't Hitler the most Dangerous man in the world during his time? Hmmmmmmm.. Please get unplugged if you aren't. Ignorance may be bliss but the truth will set you free. Get outraged!
At Smith and Speed Mercantile on Orcas Island, hand tools line the walls and tables along with organic wool comforters and non-toxic paints. It's an extension of Kathleen Smith and Errol Speed's off-grid homestead where they work at "the speed of living," using hand tools that reconnect them to the earth.
A documentary that Americans won't ever see. The gigantic biotech corporation Monsanto is threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has served mankind for thousands of years. There’s nothing they are leaving untouched: the mustard, the okra, the bringe oil, the rice, the cauliflower. Once they have established the norm: that seed can be owned as their property...
This video plugging Avaaz.org exposes the myth of a fundamental clash between Islam and the West as a problem of politics—not cultures. It received over 1.4 million views and 37,000 comments on Youtube (right up there with Star Wars Kid), and helped secure Avaaz.org as the place for international online activism.
The clock is ticking... See how a 12-year-old girl could be the solution the world needs right now. The Girl Effect : The unique potential of 600 million adolescent girls to end poverty for themselves and the world. WHY GIRLS? Because when adolescent girls in the developing world have a chance, they can be the most powerful force of change for themselves, their families, communities and...
Scientists predict that if we continue fishing as we are now, we will see the end of most seafood by 2048. Oceans without fish. Imagine your meals without seafood. Imagine the global consequences. This is the future if we do not stop, think and act. The End of the Line chronicles how demand for cod off the coast of Newfoundland in the early 1990s led to the decimation of the most...
Gary Caganoff's 'captivating and gutsy' film on Afghanistan. "A creative masterpiece of Human Rights film making". 50 min documentary and extras available on DVD only. Recipient of the WACC/SIGNIS Human Rights Award, 2010. http://www.thegardenattheendoftheworld.info/
There is no time left to be complacent. The world is changing now. Not tomorrow. Be part of the change for good. The love. Not the fear. Let go your attachment to the old world and embrace the new.