Working for the Enemy

The impact of Marx on the 20th century has been all-pervasive and world-wide. This program looks at the man, at the roots of his philosophy, at the causes and explanations of his philosophical development, and at its most direct outcome: the failed Soviet Union.

Some time after her death, film director Jill Craigie (1911- 99), re-opens an old suitcase, prompting memories of the extraordinary life and loves of this forceful, charismatic woman, whose work has been long neglected. Craigie was one of the first women to direct documentaries. Working outside the British Documentary Movement in the 1940s and early 1950s, her films such as To Be Woman (1951), on equal pay, and Out of Chaos (1944), the first film about artists at work, featuring Henry Moore and Paul Nash, tackled new subjects for the cinema through a unique blend of drama, polemic and humour. Independent Miss Craigie uses the director’s unseen papers, and her films, to reveal her energetic struggles to get her radical projects made and distributed, including her last one, on the Yugoslav conflict, made when she was 83, with her husband, former Labour leader, Michael Foot.

An innovative and charismatic influencer is suddenly exiled from her community of creative partners and colleagues when she states an opinion that she did not know was “unacceptable” in their eyes.

Michael Moore's view on how the Bush administration allegedly used the tragic events on 9/11 to push forward its agenda for unjust wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A documentary about the closure of General Motors' plant at Flint, Michigan, which resulted in the loss of 30,000 jobs. Details the attempts of filmmaker Michael Moore to get an interview with GM CEO Roger Smith.

Unemployment at an early age and the problems that arise from it.

"Don't Let The Bastards Grind You Down" is a documentary film about British social policy. The focus is on the political struggle against neoliberal austerity policies, which have their origins in the hated Thatcher government. The film features the former socialist MP Dave Nellist, who is now the national chair of the Trade Unionist & Socialist Coalition and Hannah Sell, the general secretary of the Socialist Party. The film features a local election campaign in the miners' town of Nuneaton, students campaigning against an increase in tuition fees and refuse workers from Birmingham striking against massive cuts to their wages.

The free, almost naive view from the perspective of a child puts the "68ers" in a new, illuminating light in the anniversary year 2008. The film is a provocative reckoning with the ideological upbringing that seemed so progressive and yet was suffocated by the children's desire to finally grow up. With an ironic eye and a feuilletonistic style, author Richard David Precht and Cologne documentary film director André Schäfer trace a childhood in the West German provinces - and place the major events of those years in completely different, smaller and very private contexts.

In the run-up to parliamentary elections in mid-October, Polish filmmaker Marcin Wierzchowski travelled across his country to gauge the atmosphere in a society that is more divided than ever.

A squatted bank tower in downtown Caracas is transformed into a socialist micro-society by 3000 people. RUINA tells about difficulties and achievements by building up a community in a vertical city.

Torre David, a 45-story office tower in Caracas, was almost complete when it was abandoned following the death of its developer and collapse of the Venezuelan economy. Today, it is the improvised home of more than 750 families, living in an extra-legal occupation that some call a vertical slum.

Napalm is the story of the breathtaking and brief encounter, in 1958, between a French member of the first Western European delegation officially invited to North Korea after the devastating Korean war and a nurse working for the Korean Red Cross hospital, in Pyongyang, capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

A documentary on the late American entertainer Dean Reed, who became a huge star in East Germany after settling there in 1973.

"The Voice of Innocence" is a documentary that shows how, starting in 1959, the Cuban Revolution put into practice a comprehensive and universal policy of safeguarding the rights of the child, even under the multiple difficulties resulting from the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States more than six decades ago. Cuba is one of the main signatories of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, signed on 20 November 1989, when the country had already made extraordinary progress in protecting the rights of the child, in comparison to developed countries, such as the United States, which as of today hasn't yet ratified the Convention.

Une ambition politique

Arbeitslos

Documentary film with play scenes about the rise and fall of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919 from the perspective of various well-known poets and writers who experienced the events as contemporary witnesses.

The Show Must Go On is a personal journey behind the scenes that confronts the epidemic of mental health issues in the Australian entertainment industry.

There was also flower power under socialism. From the late 1960s to the late 1980s, hippies from East Berlin, Warsaw, Prague and Budapest dreamed of conquering a world that was actually closed to them. They wore long hair, beards and parkas, squatted houses, lived in communes, listened to blues and rock 'n' roll - music was their philosophy and world view. The documentary looks back at the flower children of the East, for whom Woodstock was further away than the moon.

A cartoon film about the whole heterogeneous mixture of Canada and Canadians, and the way the invisible adhesive called federalism makes it all cling together. That the dissenting voices are many is made amply evident, in English and French. But this animated message also shows that Canadians can laugh at themselves and work out their problems objectively.