The Best Social Change Documentaries of 2011

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, and this collective understanding has given way to collective action in a myriad of movements. 

Among them: Occupy Wall St, Zeitgeist, Transition Towns, Permaculture, Relocalization, and 350.org. While they each focus on a different aspect of the problem, they share a common foundation of understanding, a common direction, and complimentary goals.

Likewise, the films of 2011 captured the spirit of these movements and the deep analysis of both the problem and the solutions - which go beyond hacking at branches to address the root issues.

Without further ado, the 10 best activist documentaries of 2011 (click the links to watch them for free online):

10. Subconscious War Subconscious War is a short documentary on media, reality, and the culture of violence, It covers the prophecies of Aldous Huxley and Neil Postman's grim assessment of our Brave New World and relates these to our violence and the cultural influences that fosters it today.

9. Capitalism Is The Crisis: Radical Politics in the Age of Austerity This documentary explains the nature of capitalist crisis, visits the protests against austerity measures, and recommends revolutionary paths for the future.

8. END: CIV Directed by Franklin Lopez, 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...

7. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace 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.

6. The Billionaires' Tea Party The Tea Party movement has taken American politics by storm. But is this truly a populist uprising or one of the greatest feats of propaganda ever seen? Seeking to find out, Australian filmmaker Taki Oldham embeds himself in the Tea Party uprising.

5. Zeitgeist: Moving Forward A feature length documentary by Peter Joseph that presents the case for a needed transition out of the current socioeconomic monetary paradigm which governs the entire world society.

4. Rise Like Lions: OWS and the Seeds of Revolution Scott Noble, who also produced Lifting the Veil, pulls together a combination of internet and original footage to create the first feature-length documentary on Occupy Wall St, telling the story and motivation behind the movement in its own words.

3. The Crisis of Civilization The Crisis of Civilization is a documentary feature film investigating how global crises like ecological disaster, financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages are converging symptoms of a single, failed global system.

2. Lifting the Veil: Obama and the Failure of Capitalist Democracy This film explores the historical role of the Democratic Party as the "graveyard of social movements", the massive influence of corporate finance in elections, the absurd disparities of wealth in the United States, the escalation of neocon policies under Obama...

1. The Economics of Happiness Going local’ is a powerful strategy to repair our fractured world—our ecosystems, our societies and our selvesEconomic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking.