Following a 9 month long international screening run, the independent UK documentary The Fourth Estate is now online for all to view, download, and share for free.
During 2015 filmmakers Elizabeth Mizon and Lee Salter hosted numerous sold-out screenings and Q&A sessions throughout the UK (and some very small, intimate, engaged audiences, too) and even held a Skype Q&A session with the audience at the 2015 Montreal Anarchist Film Festival. They want their take on the monopolisation of the global mainstream media industry to be seen and heard far and wide, and thus they are now making their film free for all to see and screen. Though the ‘official’ screening run is now over, anyone can still host a screening of the film, anywhere. See the official site to contact the filmmakers and organise a screening in your city. To read about the zero-budget, two-year production process of The Fourth Estate, and the filmmakers’ take on radical filmmaking, read their article in Film International.
The full synopsis of the film is below. Thanks to all who supported the production, and those who continue to fight for a free, just, and independent media into 2016. Keep in touch @fourthestatedoc.
Examining the people and practices of the media industries, The Fourth Estate illuminates not only specific incidences of corruption by press groups, but how the wider business as a whole, including the film and entertainment industries, has a huge amount to answer for in the state of the political economy of the west. There’s no business like show business…
Produced in the UK on a zero-budget, the filmmakers spent two years contacting and interviewing journalists, organisers and critics of the corrupt industrial practices highlighted by, but not limited to, the Leveson Inquiry in 2011. While the phone hacking scandal illuminated the depth and breadth of the cavalier flouting of legality and integrity in British journalism, there are larger implications and connections to ideology, entertainment, and political economy at work in this crisis. The Fourth Estate is the result of an examination of these connections at work.
In the wake of the Leveson report the media’s focus has quickly diverted from a brief period of self-examination to business as usual. This opportunity for serious consideration of the true, entrenched causes and effects of the UK’s inadequate media must not go unexplored, and the recent press scandals must not be framed in terms of the “bad apple” soundbites we’re so often fed.
A film by Lee Salter and Elizabeth Mizon
GFX by Scubaboy Inc.
UK, 2015, 80 mins | fourthestatedoc.com | @fourthestatedoc