Dealers in Death

Tying in neatly with President Roosevelt’s request for legislation to take the profit out of war and with the current Senatorial investigation of the munitions industry, “Dealers in Death,” at the Criterion, presents the case histories of the world’s leading armament manufacturers with incidental excursions, via the newsreels, into past wars, present preparations for wars and a grim forecast of what wars of the future may be like.
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Report from the Aleutians

Director John Huston, while a member of the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1943, creates an Academy Award winning doc, which he narrates with assistance from his actor father Walter, treating of the Armed Forces’ successful effort to prevent the fall of the Aleutian Islands to advancing Japanese troops who had captured several islets. Although no claim can be reasonably made that this location was of major strategic importance during the War, it presented enormous tactical and logistic difficulty for those assigned there, and Huston’s color film demonstrates the determined ensemble work upon the outpost of Adak by a wide range of military specialists who combat loneliness and boredom along with notably severe weather conditions.
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Hearts and Minds

The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner. Life is cheap in the Orient. Hearts and Minds is an Academy Award winning documentary about the Vietnam War directed by Peter Davis.
The film’s title is based on a quote from President Lyndon B. Johnson: “the ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there”. The movie was chosen as Best Feature Documentary at the 47th Academy Awards presented in 1975.
The film premiered at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. Commercial distribution was delayed in the United States due to legal issues, including a temporary restraining order obtained by one of the interviewees, former National Security Advisor Walt Rostow who had claimed through his attorney that the film was “somewhat misleading” and “not representative” and that he had not been given the opportunity to approve the results of his interview.
After Columbia Pictures refused to distribute the picture, Bert Schneider and Henry Jaglom purchased back the rights and released the film in March 1975 through Warner Bros.
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Combat America

This DVD is basically a World War II doc film made for Stateside audiences about life in the Mighty Eighth Air Force in England and in the deadly skies over Europe. Narrated by Clark Gable, who actually flew around five missions in B-17′s before heading off to safer locales, the film follows the daily lives of the men of the 351st Bomb Group based in England and follows the men into the air.
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Attack! Battle of New Britain

The American army prepares to attack the Japanese-held island of New Britain in early 1944. Using extensive footage of the US Infantry training and fighting in the Pacific, flowing arrow battle maps and a sometimes impassioned narration by actor Lloyd Nolan, producer Frank Capra’s ATTACK!: THE BATTLE FOR NEW BRITAIN is one of the many fine documentaries he produced during the Second World War. Capra is best known as a documentarian for his Why We Fight series, which were also made during the war and which chronicled Europe’s and the Allies’ war against Germany.
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The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress

Movie Guide Unabashedly sentimental, this war film was produced by David Putnam in partnership with Catherine Wyler, whose father William Wyler directed an acclaimed doc about the real-life events depicted in the film. The ensemble cast is composed of ten young actors portraying the crew of the World War II B-17 bomber Memphis Belle, anticipating their 25th and last mission before they will be able to go home.
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Memory of the Camps

Sixty years ago, in the spring of 1945, Allied forces liberating Europe found evidence of atrocities which have tortured the world’s conscience ever since. As the troops entered the German concentration camps, they made a systematic film record of what they saw. Work began in the summer of 1945 on the doc, but the film was left unfinished.
FRONTLINE found it stored in a vault of London’s Imperial War Museum and, in 1985, broadcast it for the first time using the title the Imperial War Museum gave it, ‘Memory of the Camps.
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Iraq in Fragments

Filmmaker James Longley offers three thumbnail sketches of Iraq as the nation struggles to its feet following the American Invasion in this documentary. In the film’s first chapter, Mohammed Haithem is an 11-year-old forced to make his own way in Bagdhad after the disappearance of his parents. Mohammed earns his keep working in an auto-repair shop, though he would prefer to go back to school, and has developed a precocious cynicism about the presence of U.S. troops along with a fear of the ongoing battles between Sunni and Shia forces.
Elsewhere, the struggle of the Kurdish people of Iraq is personified in a handful of people working together on a farm, where they tend crops, make bricks, and look to their blighted past as well as hoping for a brighter future. And the fundamentalist Shiite cabal of Moqtada Sadr is profiled as they travel from Najaf to Naseriyah, promoting government based on a strict interpretation of Muslim law.
As Moqtada Sadr’s military cadres enforce the rule they have set down, they clash with American soldiers, further dividing an already polarized populace. Iraq in Fragments was screened in competition at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival… (Barnes & Noble)
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The Panama Deception

Years before the US went after Saddam Hussein, the White House had Manuel Noriega, another former ally, in its sights.
In their Oscar-winning doc, director Barbara Trent and writer/editor David Kasper (Cover Up: Behind the Iran Contra Affair) contrast media coverage of the 1989 invasion with expert testimony.
The filmmakers backtrack to America’s turn-of-the-century takeover of the Panama Canal–and volatile aftermath–before flashing forward to the reform-minded Carter era. When the CIA-supported Noriega comes to power, reform gives way to repression, and Reagan calls for the dictator’s ouster.
His successor, Bush, brings in the troops. It would be one thing if they only targeted military facilities, but witnesses claim soldiers also fired on civilians and residential property (a Pentagon spokesman denies the accusation).
Depending on the source, casualties ranged from 250 to 4,000. Narrated by Elizabeth Montgomery, Panama Deception was shot on video–and looks it–but content is king.
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Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers

Join doc filmmaker Robert Greenwald (Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, Outfoxed) in assessing the damage done to average Americans when corporations decide to wage war. For critics of the current administration, the connection between the war in Iraq and the private corporations who profit from the fighting is plain to see.. For those who may not be so easily convinced, however, Greenwald and company not only explore the questionable motivations of the corporate decision-makers whose wartime profiteering has affected the lives of countless soldiers and their families, but also the increasingly negative international reputation of the United States as a result.
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The World at War (30th Anniversary Edition)

The second World War had a profound effect on the course of the 20th century, and unfortunately, its horrors, including “ethnic cleansing,” terrorism, despotism, invasions, the curtailment of civil rights, and rampant nationalism, are still concerns of the modern day. The doc series The World at War is outstanding in its ability to unfold the complex issues of WWII in a clear, objective, and gripping manner.
Each of the 26 episodes of this five-DVD set, narrated by Laurence Olivier, focuses on a particular, specific aspect of the war, starting at the beginning with Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and progressing through the end of the war. Because of this focus, each episode examines its subject in detail, going beyond the names-and-dates style of history that I remember being subjected to in high school, to delve into the much more interesting and important issues of “how and why.”
I learned something new from every single episode, starting with the very first one. The episodes proceed overall on a regular timeline from the beginning to the end of the war, but since a great deal often happened over a short period of time, the series backtracks at several points to fill in what was happening in different places. For instance, after we are taken through the events from Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in the late 1930s to the Battle of Britain and Hitler’s attacks on Russia. (Barnes & Noble)
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Probably you’ll have to go to YouTube to see the complete playlist

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Ghosts of Abu Ghraib

Award winning doc filmmaker Rory Kennedy explores the human and political consequences of one of the most bitter scandals of the war in Iraq in this feature. In the 1960′s, a prison was built in Abu Ghraib, an Iraqi city west of Baghdad, and during the regime of Saddam Hussein it became a center of torture and abuse where political dissidents were subjected to agonizing punishment or death.
Following the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003, the prison was taken over by American military authorities, and was used as a holding facility for prisoners of war and suspected terrorists captured by U.S. forces.
The prison’s reputation as a site of widespread abuse rose again when journalists discovered photographs of Iraqi prisoners being tortured and humiliated in an ugly variety of ways by American soldiers, a scandal which had a major impact on international thinking about the war.
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib offers an in-depth look at the story behind the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, featuring interviews with observers on both sides of the national divide. Ghosts of Abu Ghraib received its world premiere at the 2007. (Barnes & Noble)
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The Prisoner or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair

The Prisoner Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair represents a follow-up to husband-and-wife filmmaking team Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s critically-worshipped, defiantly nonpartisan doc Gunner Palace (2004), on the day-to-day of American soldiers stationed on the Iraqi front. In that earlier picture, Tucker and Epperlein stumble across Yunis Khatayer Abbas, a Middle Eastern man who merely confesses, “I am a journalist,” before American soldiers drag him off to incarceration. The Tuckers reconnected with Abbas at a later point, and disinter his backstory in this film.
Tortured by the goons of Saddam Hussein’s brother, Uday Hussein, Abbas later became a key terrorist suspect of the U.S. government, who believed that he intended to kill British prime minister Tony Blair. American authorities had Abbas thrown into the notorious Abu Ghirab prison (and other penitentiaries) and subjected him to month after month of grueling interrogation. Eventually, they released him… (Barnes & Noble)
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No End in Sight

On March 19, 2003, forces from the United States and a handful of allied nations invaded Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
American military leaders expected the conflict to last no more than a few months, and President George W. Bush declared that major military operations were over less than two months later.
However, Iraq soon became a dangerous quagmire for American forces, and near the end of 2006, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, one of the key architects of America’s strategy in Iraq, resigned from office due to public outcry and Bush declared he was “rethinking” his plan of attack in Iraq as the nation sank into civil war, with U.S. troops the frequent targets of attacks on both sides.
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Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre

This war can not have witnesses. It can not have witnesses because it is based on lies. The Americans have permitted only embedded journalists to go to Fallujah. Despite that, for example the image of the marine that shoots the wounded and unarmed warrior inside the Fallujah Mosque has gone out. And exactly because this image has gone out, we do not know how, and because it has circulated all over the world, the NBC journalist that has recorded it has been immediately expelled from the embedded body. Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre is a doc film by Sigfrido Ranucci and Maurizio Torrealta which first aired on Italy’s RAI state television network on November 8, 2005.
The film documents the use of weapons that the doc asserts are chemical weapons, particularly the use of incendiary bombs, and alleges indiscriminate use of violence against civilians and children by military forces of the United States of America in the city of Fallujah in Iraq during the Fallujah Offensive of November 2004.
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I Know I’m Not Alone

This film came out of the director’s frustration with watching the nightly news and hearing generals, politicians and pundits, explaining the political and economic cost of the war in the Middle East, without ever mentioning the human cost. He wanted to hear about the war by the people affected by it most: doctors, nurses, poets, artists, soldiers, and his personal favorite, musicians. Michael Franti, world-renowned musician and human rights worker, travels to Iraq, Palestine and Israel to explore the human cost of war with a group of friends, some video cameras and his guitar.
A compelling soundtrack, visual and musical montages and Franti’s intimate voiceovers make the film speak to the MTV, X, Y & Z generations, as well as the baby-boomers. A true armchair travel film pulling the audience into these war zones in the company of Michael’s guitar, eloquence and wit – you feel the humanity, artistic resilience and sometimes horrific experience of what it’s like to live under the bombs and military occupation.
With its guerrilla style footage captured in active war zones, the doc is unlike the many academic and politically driven pieces in the marketplace, instead offering the audience a sense of intimate travel and the opportunity to hear the voices of everyday people living, creating and surviving under the harsh conditions of war and occupation..
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Invisible Children

Without having seen the suffering in Northern Uganda, I’m appalled frankly, it’s a moral outrage to see thousands of children that have been abducted, that are maltreated, that go through the most horrendous torture by the rebel movement and also the same groups now being neglected, to some extent, by the whole international community. I can not find any other part of the world having an emergency at the scale of Uganda with so little international attention. What started out as a film-making adventure in Africa, transformed into much more, when the three young American’s (Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey, and Laren Poole) original travels took a divine turn, and they found themselves stranded in Northern Uganda. They discovered children being kidnapped nightly from their homes and subsequently forced to become fight as child soldiers. This film is dedicated to exposing this tragic, and amazingly untold story.
Even at this moment, in Uganda, Children as young as 8 are methodically kidnapped from their homes by a rebel group called the “Lord’s Resistance Army” (LRA). The abducted children are then desensitized to the horror of brutal violence and killing, as they themselves are turned into vicious fighters. Some escape and hide in constant fear for their lives. Most remain captive, and grow to maturity with no education other than life “in the bush” and fighting in a guerrilla war. Of the many ramifications that a 20 -year-long war can cause, the film “Invisible Children: Rough Cut” highlights what the community refers to as “NIGHT COMMUTERS.” We watch thousands of children “commute” out of fear, from their villages to nearby towns each night in order to avoid the LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) abductions. They sleep in public places, vulnerable, and without supervision.
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Enemy Image

When Baghdad exploded under bombs, television chose to bring us fireworks. But does this distant and spectacular image tell us what is really happening on the ground, how it feels or what it means? Television has the means to take us anywhere and show us anything. It can bring us the physical experience of war with all its’ horrors, like no other medium, and yet the image of American war on television is disembodied, bloodless, and unreal. The invasion of Iraq was the most closely documented war ever fought. Lasting only 800 hours, it produced 20,000 hours of video, but those images were tightly controlled, producing a monolithic view of combat sanitized and controlled by the Pentagon.
Enemy Image traces the ways us television has covered war, starting with Vietnam in the 1960s and shows how the military has devised ever-improving means of ensuring the American public never again has the real face of combat beamed directly into their living rooms. Comparing footage of Vietnam, including rarely-seen material shot in North Vietnam, to coverage of Iraq and using extensive interviews with veteran war correspondents and news anchors, Mark Daniels demonstrates how television that once revealed the truth is now increasingly used to hide it.
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War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death

In real time, officials have explained and justified these military operations to the American people by withholding crucial information about the actual reasons and potential costs of military action again and again, choosing to present an easier version of war’s reality; a steady and remarkably consistent storyline designed not to inform, but to generate and maintain support and enthusiasm for war. War Made Easy reaches into the Orwellian memory hole to expose a 50-year pattern of government deception and media spin that has dragged the United States into one war after another from Vietnam to Iraq. Narrated by actor and activist Sean Penn, the film exhumes remarkable archival footage of official distortion and exaggeration from LBJ to George W. Bush, revealing in stunning detail how the American news media have uncritically disseminated the pro-war messages of successive presidential administrations.

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Gitmo: The New Rules of War

It’s a Swedish doc about the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base by Erik Gandini and Tarik Saleh.
Features interviews with Janis Karpinski, Mehdi Ghezali and Geoffrey Miller (MG), among others. Gitmo premiered at IDFA in 2005, and reached mainstream theaters in Sweden on February 10, 2006. In 2003, a year after Swedish citizen Mehdi Ghezali was detained at “Gitmo”, which sparked some media interest in Sweden, Erik and Tarik started filming the doc and visited the base on a guided tour of selected areas.
Mehdi Ghezali was released in 2004, and was interviewed for the film. In 2006, the musical score composed by Krister Linder won first prize for music in a TV feature at the Festival international Musique et Cinéma in Auxerre, France.
In the wake of the 9/11 2001 terrorist attacks, the United States opened a prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The hundreds of prisoners believed to be detained there are not afforded prisoners of war status according to the Geneva Convention. They are labeled unlawful combatants, held indefinitely with no right to a lawyer or a trial.

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