After Mein Kampf

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In this shallow combination of documentary and fiction, shocking footage of concentration camp survivors, dead bodies, Hitler’s rantings, German soldiers enthusiastically singing patriotic songs, and similar scenes of World War II are mixed with enacted film clips, such as a German soldier raping a woman — or worse. Even before the director asks the clearly spurious question of whether or not Hitler is really dead, many viewers might feel offended by the way in which the emphasis on bestiality and other crimes seems to take precedence over an honest or insightful approach to the inhumanity of the Nazi regime.

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Mahatma: Life of Gandhi, 1869-1948

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his is a film which seeks to tell the life-story of Gandhi the Man and his incessant search for Truth. In this world so full of hatred and violence, this man of peace and goodwill fought all evil and injustice with Soul-Force. He stands out as a challenge giving the message of truth and non-violence, of love supreme and unbounded. He is the Mahatma – the Great Soul – the name given to him by the people of India.

Gandhi has left an indelible mark on human history. His thought is ever relevant for all those who aspire for a better and fuller life. The Gandhi National Memorial Trust has made a humble attempt to perpetuate Gandhi’s memory by presenting the first complete biographical documentary film of his life which, in a large measure, reflects the history of India’s struggle for freedom.

Animation, live photography and old prints, have been blended to give an integrated image of his life. Some of the material is bound to be technically imperfect but it is an authentic portrayal of history. The story too is narrated in all simplicity and dignity using mostly Gandhi’s own words.

Even a full-length documentary film is but an inadequate instrument for depicting Gandhi’s many-splendoured life and his varied activities. Consistent with the aim of presenting a full picture, the length here was inevitable; shorter films depicting different aspects of his life will also be presented.

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The Many Faces of Lee Harvey Oswald

Who created the intelligence legend that was Lee Harvey Oswald might lead us to the men behind the death of President Kennedy.” – Former FBI Agent Zack Shelton. There has been much controversy over the guilt or innocence of Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Now, prepare for more controversy as New York Times Best-selling author Jim Marrs and award-winning photo analyst Jack White take you on a mind bending tour of evidence indicating that more than one Oswald existed in 1963. See for yourself the inconsistencies within government records and examples of impersonation. Laced with dramatic reenactments, this documentary presents a wide array of documents and photographs that will leave you wondering who was the man killed by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby two days after the JFK assassination.

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The Iceman: Confessions of a Mafia Hitman

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Part 2

The Iceman is an appropriate title for this pair of HBO specials, because the words of former Mafia enforcer Richard Kuklinski will chill you to the bone.

Speaking in the monotonous drone of a man who has numbed himself with remorseless brutality, Kuklinski was first interviewed in 1991, five years after receiving consecutive life sentences for multiple murders.

Specializing in the tidy use of cyanide, Kuklinski lived a double life, like the fictional hitmen in The Sopranos and Road to Perdition, passing as a “businessman” and devoted husband and father. He describes numerous killings in graphic detail, expressing nearly tearful regret only when lamenting the deception of his family.

A vicious product of child abuse, Kuklinski was visited again by HBO in 2001, but this shameless redundancy was an obvious attempt to capitalize on the Sopranos phenomenon. Fascinating as a firsthand record of Mafia killing, these otherwise unsavory interviews serve little purpose beyond morbid exploitation.

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Capturing the Friedmans

Truth is often more harrowing than fiction, but it is a desperately elusive entity; even in a case such as the one explored in this disturbing but mesmerizing documentary, for which first-time filmmaker Andrew Jarecki enjoyed remarkable access to his subjects. Even Jarecki, who persuaded the family of accused child molesters Arnold and Jesse Friedman to cooperate with him, cannot decide whether the two are guilty, and his film raises as many questions as answers.

Capturing the Friedmans deals with the middle-class Long Island family torn apart in 1987 by child-molestation charges filed after a police raid uncovered kiddie porn apparently belonging to dad Arnold, a respected high school science teacher. He and his 18-year-old son, Jesse, were subsequently accused of molesting dozens of young boys, and their travails are painstakingly documented in this videotaped compilation, which even includes family footage recorded by another Friedman son, David.

We see strategy sessions between Arnold and his attorneys, conflicting testimony from alleged victims, posturing by police investigators and legal teams, and even the heartrending family farewells taped the night…

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Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple

Produced for the PBS series American Experience, Stanley Nelson’s Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples’ Temple, written by his frequent collaborator Marcia Smith, examines the infamous religious cult formed by Jim Jones and the events that led to the group’s horrifying mass suicide in 1978. The film traces Jones’ history from his unhappy childhood in rural Indiana.

Witnesses describe a strange, charismatic young man who nursed a seemingly sincere desire for social justice, but also reputedly murdered small animals as a child. Jones’ desire to befriend people across color and class lines alienated his family and neighbors. Eventually, he moved to Indianapolis, where, as a young Pentecostal minister, he started the city’s first integrated church.

Eventually, Jones moved his church to California to escape the racism he perceived in Indiana. In Redwood Valley, his church took on a new life, and he began aggressively recruiting new members. At first, members were required to tithe a percentage of their worth, but eventually, they were expected to relinquish all of their “worldly goods” to the Temple. In 1974, Jones moved to San Francisco, where he acquired some political clout before his high profile caught up with him.

Just before a damaging exposé was published, he moved his people to what was meant to be a “paradise” outside the racism and oppression of America, in Guyana. Nelson interviews eyewitnesses, including many former members of the Temple, and members of Congressman Leo Ryan’s staff who managed to escape when the congressman’s investigatory visit ended in bloodshed. The film had its world premiere at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival.

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Biography: Barack Obama

This cable-television biography about the life of Illinois senator Barack Obama was made before he began campaigning to be the Democratic party’s candidate for the 2008 presidential race. Still, the program suggests Obama has one or another kind of profound, American destiny as a mixed-race activist who never comfortably fit into one or another group, and had to look deep into his own roots to understand his identity.

The son of a white American mother and black Kenyan father, Obama was abandoned by the latter when he returned to his native country to work for its improvement. Raised by his mother–whom Obama credits with teaching him many of his values – and his grandmother, Obama lived in Hawaii as a child but moved to Indonesia for a few years when his mom remarried. There, Obama saw cyclical poverty and the underlying factors that perpetuate it before returning to Hawaii. Interviews with childhood friends and his sister describe Obama’s restlessness before attending Harvard law school and propelling himself into a life of public service and community activism.

Often accused of lacking enough political experience to qualify him for the White House, Obama comes across in this show as a visionary and experienced consensus-builder who can reach across opposing points of view. (Excerpt from

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Young, Nazi, and Proud

Dispatches reporter David Modell films a remarkable six months spent in the questionable company of Mark Collett, leader of the youth wing of the British National Party, and reveals the true nature of a party trying to reinvent itself and broaden its appeal. A rising star of the party, Collet reveals to Modell his deeply held Nazi sympathies. This despite the party’s claim it no longer has any association with Nazism.

It’s clear why the BNP want intelligent young men like Mark, a university graduate. BNP leader Nick Griffin tells Dispatches that Collett is a potential leader of the party. But Modell is interested in trying to determine what motivates a bright young man to throw in his lot with a party which will make him reviled in public.

Modell has little in common with his subject and finds himself taking an exception to some of Collett’s interests and occupations – which range through rabid anti-Semitism (‘Jews aren’t white’) to explaining how he likes to “break” people, in particular his ex girlfriend.

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Beneath The Veil

An anonymous woman, covered from head to toe in a blue burka, is dragged across a football pitch and shot in front of 30,000 spectators. This haunting image of Taliban justice was filmed secretly in Channel 4′s award-winning documentary Beneath the Veil broadcast in June 2001. The woman was Zarmina, 35-year-old mother of seven. In a new Dispatches film, Lifting the Veil, Carla Garapedian went to Afghanistan to discover her story and see whether women’s lives have improved since the fall of the Taliban.

After a secret trial, Zarmina was jailed with her six-month-old twins. They were confined to one room for three years. She confessed that her husband, Alozai, had discovered she had committed adultery saying: ‘He said, “Tomorrow I will go to the Taliban and they will stone you to death.” That night I was afraid. I hit him over the head with a mallet.’

Money could have saved Zarmina’s life. The final Supreme Court ruling stated that her life would have been spared if she paid 10,000 dirhams ($8,000 dollars) to her seven children for the loss of their father. But she had no money. Under Taliban law, Zarmina was judged by her own children. Children often participated in Taliban justice and witnessed executions. Alozai’s brother brought the couple’s children to court. Zarmina’s mother says: ‘They were always beating the children to say their mother had killed.’

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The Unauthorized Biography of Dick Cheney

American Vice-President Dick Cheney has walked the corridors of world power for three decades. Cheney’s remarkable life story involves the relentless accumulation of power in every form. Elected for a second term, he continues to be one of the most powerful and well-connected men in the world. The fifth estate will show how he accomplished this, what it involved in terms of costs for others and what history’s judgment could be.

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Matter of Heart

The psyche is the greatest of all cosmic wonders and the “sine qua non” of the world as an object. It is in the highest degree odd that Western man, with but very few – and ever fewer – exceptions, apparently pays so little regard to this fact. Swamped by the knowledge of external objects, the subject of all knowledge has been temporarily eclipsed to the point of seeming nonexistence.

Matter of Heart is a compelling portrait of Carl Gustav Jung, whose extraordinary genius and humanity reached far beyond the sometimes exclusive realm of psychiatry into redefining the essential nature of who we are and what we hope to become.

More than a linear biography, the film presents a fuller perspective on this humanist, healer, friend, and mentor, through the skillful interweaving of rare home movies, valuable archival footage, and a wealth of interviews with such notables as Sir Laurens van der Post, Marie-Louise von Franz, and Joseph Henderson, M.D

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Nikola Tesla: The Genius Who Lit the World

This is the documentary film about Nikola Tesla, the scientist and inventor, one of the greatest men in history. Nikola Tesla was born on July 10,1856 in Smiljan, Lika in what later became Yugoslavia. His father, Milutin Tesla was a Serbian orthodox priest and his mother Djuka Mandic was an inventor in her own right of household appliances. Tesla studied at the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria and the University of Prague. He began his career as an electrical engineer with a telephone company in Budapest in 1881.

Before going to America, Tesla joined Continental Edison Company in Paris where he designed dynamos. While in Strassbourg in 1883, he privately built a prototype of the induction motor and ran it successfully. Unable to interest anyone in Europe in promoting this radical device Tesla accepted an offer to work for Thomas Edison in New York.

Young Nikola Tesla came to the United States in 1884. Tesla will spend the next 59 years of his productive life living in New York. Tesla set about improving line of dynamos while working in Edison’s lab in New Jersey. It was here that his divergence of opinion with Edison over direct current versus alternating current began. This disagreement climaxed in the Battle of Currents as Edison fought a losing battle to protect his investment in direct current equipment and facilities.

Direct current flows continuously in one direction; alternating current changes direction 50 or 60 times per second, and can be stepped up to very high voltage levels, minimizing power loss across great distances. The future belongs to the alternating current. Nikola Tesla developed polyphase alternating current system of generators, motors and transformers and held 40 basic U.S. patents on the system, which George Westinghouse bought, determined to supply America with Tesla system. In February 1882, Tesla discovered rotating magnetic field, a fundamental principle in physics and the basis of nearly all devices that use alternating current.

Tesla’s A-C induction motor is widely used throughout the world in industry and household appliances. This motor started the industrial revolution at he turn of the century. Electricity today is generated, transmitted and converted to mechanical power by means of his inventions. Tesla’s greatest achievement is his polyphase alternating current system, which is today lighting the entire globe.

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Bill Clinton: His Life

His Life follows Bill Clinton through his college days as a war protester, his years of purported womanizing as governor of Arkansas, his possible connections to drug trafficking and subsequent murders, ‘Filegate,’ the Whitewater scandal and his questionable decisions, campaign financing and practices during his two terms as President of the United States — always in the shadow of wife Hillary.

Interspersed with interviews, His Life is a thought-provoking documentary in the narrative style which compels the viewer to take a hard look at the life of one of the most controversial American presidents of all time.

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Declassified: Ayatollah Khomeini

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Before there was Osama bin Laden there was Ayatollah Khomeini, a radical Muslim leader who challenged the world’s “infidels” in the name of Allah. After his father was killed by bandits, the young Khomeini was brought up by his mother and aunt. However, when he was only fifteen he suffered further loss as his aunt died and then shortly afterwards his mother also passed away. Under the guidance of his elder brother he learnt Islamic science, literature, and philosophy, eventually becoming a leading authority on theological law. In 1962 he became politically active and openly protested against the torturing and imprisonment of the people by the Shah of Iran, whose regime was seen to be safeguarding the interests of the US.

On June 3 1963, Khomeini made a historic speech against the dependence of the Shah’s regime on foreign powers, and its support of Israel. He was immediately arrested, but his imprisonment inspired major public demonstrations of support, that were eventually crushed by government troops in tanks. Then in November 1964, he was arrested for a second time, and sent into exile, first to Turkey and then to Iraq, where for fifteen years Khomeini wrote and lectured against the regime in his homeland. Khomeini continued his outspoken denunciations, developing a strong religious and political following abroad, until forced to leave Iraq in 1978 by Saddam Hussein, he then moved to France.

After the Iranian government had been overthrown by an Islamic revolution in 1979, and the Shah sent into exile, Khomeini returned to Iran, declared an Islamic republic, and began to exercise ultimate authority in the nation. He was enthusiastically greeted by the people. In response to the exiled Shah’s admission to the United States in September 1979, a large crowd seized the US embassy in Tehran, taking 52 American citizens hostage. In time, Ayatollah Khomeini’s inspiration would lead to coups, terrorist bombings, hijackings and assaults against a demonised West. For some faithful Muslims, his rise became the inspiration for political rebirth

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Mike Tyson – Beyond the Glory

Who is this famous boxer who one the title in the WBC, WBA and IBF? Mike Tyson was once the most famous and successful boxer in the world.

Mike was the youngest man ever to win a world heavyweight title at just 20 years old. But his life was not always easy.

Mike Tyson – Beyond the Glory shows the becoming of the fighting machine Mike Tyson until the downfall of his career and personal life.

In 1992, Tyson was convicted of raping Desiree Washington, for which he served three years in prison.

Tyson declared bankruptcy in 2003, despite receiving over US$30 million for several of his fights and $300 million during his career. Mike Tyson retired from competitive boxing in 2005 after two consecutive knockout losses to Danny Williams and Kevin McBride.

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Exploring Einstein: Life of a Genius

(playlist – 35 minutes)

One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein changed the world with four papers that led directly to the development of atomic weapons, space travel, satellite technology and a profound understanding of the universe.

But, wracked with guilt over the real – world applications of his science – specifically, how the use of atomic weapons clashed with his religious beliefs – Einstein spent the last half of his life desperately trying to disprove the implications of so much of his work.

Learn how the greatest scientist of the 20th century would spend his final years enduring appalling professional humiliation. While most of the world hailed him as a genius, he slowly became a marginal figure within the scientific community – revered, but ignored. And it was all because he could not accept the fact that his life’s work stood at odds with his personal beliefs.

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Bruce Lee – A Warrior’s Journey

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Bruce Lee was inarguably the greatest martial arts star of his generation, and his intense on-screen charisma and astounding fighting skills make him the standard by which other martial arts heroes are measured.

Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey is a documentary about Lee’s life, career, and untimely death, which uses rare behind-the-scenes footage to paint a portrait of both the star the world knew and the man behind the image.

Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey also includes rare, recently discovered film shot for Game of Death, the project Lee was working on at the time of his death.

This documentary marks the first time the surviving Game of Death material has been assembled according to Lee’s script notes, in an attempt to honor Lee’s ambitious intentions for the film.

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Timothy Leary – The Man Who Turned On America

Timothy Leary was early advocate of LSD experimentation. Leary taught psychology at Harvard and by 1960 was doing experiments with LSD and other hallucinogens, first on prison inmates and then on himself and his friends. LSD was not illegal at the time.

In 1960, Allen Ginsberg, supervised by Leary, ingested psilocybin mushrooms, (under the influence of the drug, he phoned Jack Kerouac, identifying himself as God to the telephone operator), and began to spread the word about the new powerful psychedelic drugs.

In August 1960, Leary traveled to the Mexican city of Cuernavaca with Russo and tried psilocybin mushrooms for the first time, an experience that drastically altered the course of his life. In 1965, Leary commented that he “learned more about… (his) brain and its possibilities… (and) more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than… (he) had in the preceding fifteen years of studying doing research in psychology.”

Upon his return to Harvard that fall, Leary and his associates, notably Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), began a research program known as the Harvard Psilocybin Project. The goal was to analyze the effects of psilocybin on human subjects (in this case, prisoners and later students of the Andover Newton Theological Seminary) using a synthesized version of the then-legal drug – one of two active compounds found in a wide variety of hallucinogenic mushrooms including Psilocybe mexicana.

The compound was produced according to a synthesis developed by research chemist Albert Hofmann of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals.

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N is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdös

In an age when genius is a mere commodity, it is useful to look at a person who led a rich life without the traditional trappings of success.

A man with no home and no job, Paul Erdös was the most prolific mathematician who ever lived. Born in Hungary in 1913, Erdös wrote and co-authored over 1,500 papers and pioneered several fields in theoretical mathematics. At the age of 83 he still spent most of his time on the road, going from math meeting to math meeting, continually working on problems. He died on September 20, 1996 while attending such a meeting in Warsaw, Poland.

The film opens at Cambridge University’s 1991 honorary doctorate ceremony, where Erdös received an award he says he would gladly trade for a “nice new proof.” For Erdös, the meaning of life is “to prove and conjecture.”

The structure of N is a Number is based on Erdös’s 50 years of perpetual wandering, “like a bumblebee,” carrying news and mathematical information from university to university. Erdös established himself as a serious mathematician at the age of 20 when he devised a more elegant proof for Chebyshev’s theorem, i.e., that there is always a prime number between any number and its double.

N is a Number is a one-hour 16mm documentary filmed over a four-year period in four countries between 1988 and 1991. The film was produced, directed and edited by George Paul Csicsery. Cinematography is by John Knoop and original music was composed by Mark Adler.

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How Bruce Lee Changed the World

The History Channel’s How Bruce Lee Changed the World explores the amazing multitude of ways that Bruce Lee–the first international Asian superstar–has influenced pop culture. Calling Lee “the biggest movie star in history” is a bit of a stretch (though every shot of this hypnotically charismatic performer argues that he might have been, had he not died abruptly before the release of his fourth and most successful movie, Enter the Dragon).

A wealth of interviewees, ranging from filmmakers like Jackie Chan (who was a stunt man on Lee’s movies in his early career), John Woo, and Brett Ratner, comedians like Eddie Griffin and Margaret Cho, musicians like LL Cool J, RZA, and Damon Albarn, athletes like boxer Sugar Ray Leonard and bodybuilder Flex Wheeler, and more, testify to the enormous impression Lee had on them.

The documentary overreaches at some points, but there’s no denying that Lee brought martial arts movies to the West and redefined the image of Asian men in the public consciousness (before him, Asian men were fiends like Fu Manchu, servants, or buffoons).

Lee’s life history is efficiently told and some of the details are delightful–who would have guessed Lee was a champion cha-cha dancer in Hong Kong? His audition for The Green Hornet reveals a movie star just waiting to be discovered. The man himself–lithe and muscular, capable of astonishing speed and grace, radiating both intelligence and passion–makes all commentary unnecessary.

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