Films that portray the way in which ordinary people have a right to choose public policies and can bring about political change by making officeholders accountable to the people.
AMAZING GRACE CELEBRATES WILLIAM WILBERFORCE Amazing Grace, directed by Michael Apted, is a biopic of William Wilberforce (played by Ioan Gruffodd), who sought to abolish slavery in his role as a member of parliament on moral grounds. In so doing, he was opposed by British businesses that made immense profits from the slave trade. Accordingly, […]
THE LISTENING SHOWS HOW THE NSA HAS THE CAPABILITY TO IMPOSE “TOTAL TYRANNY” In 2005, Italy began to issue arrest warrants for twenty-five CIA agents who in 2003 abducted Islamic cleric Abu Omar (1963- ), an Italian citizen who had been granted asylum, from a street in Milan and flew him first to Germany and
CAUTIVA BRINGS THE ARGENTINE “DIRTY WAR” INTO A BROKEN HOME From 1976-1983, some 30,000 persons who were arrested on orders of the Argentine military junta disappeared without a trace. Some of the missing persons, perhaps as many as 500, were pregnant women. Their children were adopted by those loyal to the junta but never told
DEATH OF A PRESIDENT EMPLOYS POLITICAL FUTURISTICS TO ASK WHERE AMERICA IS HEADING Take some film footage of President George W. Bush visiting Chicago, slap on some phony interviews, and the result is Death of a President, directed by Gabriel Range. After disclaimers, the movie begins on October 19, 2007. Actual film footage is interspersed
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MAN OF THE YEAR RIDICULES DEMOCRATS & REPUBLICANS WITH A WARNING ABOUT VOTING MACHINES Directed by previous Political Film Society awardwinner Barry Levinson for Good Morning, Vietnam (1988), Man of the Year is about Tom Dobbs (played by Robin Williams), who as a talk-show host jokingly says that he might run for president and then
THE QUEEN EXPOSES HOW PRIME MINISTER BLAIR SAVED THE MONARCHY The Queen, directed by Stephen Frears, is an exposé of the peculiar way in which Queen Elizabeth (played by Helen Mirren) handled the death of Lady Diana during a week in midsummer 1997 shortly after the election of Tony Blair (played by Michael Sheen) as
SOPHIE SCHOLL CELEBRATES UNDERGROUND ANTI-NAZI GERMAN MARTYRS Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is a docudrama of the last five days of a member of White Rose, a German underground organization of college students who distributed leaflets with anti-Nazi information and propaganda. The film begins on February 18, 1943. Sophie Magdalena Scholl (played by Julia Jentsch),
MACHUCA PORTRAYS THE CLASS STRUGGLE THAT BROUGHT ABOUT & UNSEATED ALLENDE IN CHILE In 1973, after the reelection of Richard Nixon, the government of democratically elected Salvador Allende was replaced by a military coup led by General Agusto Pinochet. Machuca, directed by Andrés Wood, attempts to recreate events before, during, and after the coup from
DOWNFALL EXPOSES THE LAST TEN DAYS OF HITLER’S SURREAL WORLD In Downfall (Der Untergang), director Oliver Hirschbiegel presents a vivid docudrama of the last ten days of the Third Reich, mostly inside Hitler’s Berlin bunker surrounded by the luminaries of the Nazi state. To achieve historical accuracy, the script relies on Joachim Fest’s Inside Hitler’s
THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON FINALLY CONFERS WARHOLIAN FAME ON SAMUEL BICKE What kind of person would formulate an intention to assassinate a president of the United States? The Assassination of Richard Nixon, directed by Niels Mueller, attempts to answer that question by reconstructing the personality of someone whose life ended on February 22, 1974,
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