Documentary Educational Resources - Subject / Globalization & Development / Infrastructure / All Films

Elephant's Dream

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:05:00 GMT

Elephant's Dream is a portrait of three state-owned institutions and their workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The interwoven stories of a female clerk in the dilapidated central post office, two colleagues at the railway station, and the group of firemen in the only fire station provide insight into their daily lives and survival in Kinshasa, the third largest city of Africa. Although these three government-owned institutions are running on their last legs, the film allows for a surprisingly poetic and empathetic look at a state in decline. Yet, it also bears witness to small but powerful moments of change and revolution, while at the same time functioning as a mirror to what is happening in the Western world.

Visit Infrastructure to see additional products in this category.

Free-For-All In Sararé

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:53:00 GMT

Free-For-All In Sararé
Buy Now: $295.00

More than six thousand gold and mineral prospectors have invaded the Nambiquara reserve of Sararé, Brazil, while loggers raid the area's mahogany rich forests. Only pressure from the World Bank, with whom the government of Mato Grosso is negotiating a loan, promises to bring an end to the gross environmental degradation. The government gives the prospectors 60 days to leave the area; the situation becomes increasingly tense as the state police are brought in to evacuate. Poor and desperate for a livelihood, the prospectors don't believe in the Indians' right to have a reservation, asking, "What are they going to do with all that land?"

Films in the Conflicts in the Amazon series

Free-For-All In Sararé

It's Now or Never!

Disclaimer on Naming:

Please be aware that this documentary may include outdated or potentially offensive language. Such terms are not endorsed by DER but are presented in their original context to promote awareness, education, and discussion. Learn more about DER’s efforts to use reparative language and honor the preferred names of Indigenous communities by clicking here.

Visit Infrastructure to see additional products in this category.

The First Contacts

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:53:00 GMT

The First Contacts
Buy Now: $295.00

With the colonization of Brazil's mid-West in the 1950s and the construction of the Transamazônica and other highways in the 1970s, whites began to make large-scale contact with Indians, with disastrous results. Epidemics decimated populations of groups such as the Cinta-Larga, with the deaths amounting in some cases to veritable genocide. Groups of Indians were separated from relatives, their land parceled out to settlers under the auspices a colonial mythology that advocated "progress" over the rights of indigenous people. Archive footage shows the "pacification" of the Xavantes People, the Cinta Larga People in Rondônia, and the Parakanas in the south of Pará, and how this catastrophic contact decimated these populations. Even into the year 2000, a FUNAI crew works to find small, still-isolated groups that might be under threat from farmers and prospectors. In this video, the last survivor of an annihilated people refuses to make contact.

Disclaimer on Naming:
Please be aware that this documentary may include outdated or potentially offensive language. Such terms are not endorsed by DER but are presented in their original context to promote awareness, education, and discussion. Learn more about DER’s efforts to use reparative language and honor the preferred names of Indigenous communities by clicking here.

Visit Infrastructure to see additional products in this category.

It's a Young Country

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 12:44:00 GMT

It's a Young Country
Buy Now: $295.00

Commissioned to make a film for a teaching case at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, filmmaker Charles Mann drew upon seven years as a working economist in Turkey to produce a film that captures the spirit of the country's cultural and economic transformation.

Top management of Akbank, arguably Turkey's most successful bank, provide a window into contemporary Turkey and its prospects as they weigh alternative paths for the bank's future growth. Explaining Akbank's emphasis on innovation and youth, Chairman and Managing Director Suzan Sabancı Dinçer sums up Turkey's demographic transformation: "It's a young country!".

Economic historian Professor Yahya Sezai Tezel provides contextual narrative about the country's economic and cultural restructuring. Director Franco Sacchi's inspired cinematography provides images that support and illustrate the film's narrative arc of transformation. This film provides a real sense of engagement with contemporary Turkey by allowing viewers to see the country through the eyes of people both propelling and reacting to change in coastal and Anatolian towns, in universities, in metropolitan centers.

Films in the Development Communications Workshop series

If It Doesn't Rain

If It Doesn't Rain: First Return

It's A Young Country: Turkey and Akbank

Lifecycles

Malawi's Green Revolution

Paths of Hope

Visit Infrastructure to see additional products in this category.

Richard Leacock & Valerie Lalonde: The Paris Years 1989-2009

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 08:59:00 GMT

Richard Leacock & Valerie Lalonde: The Paris Years 1989-2009
Buy Now: $675.00

Richard Leacock was one of the few genuine pioneers in the field of documentary filmmaking and one of its greatest innovators — along with Al Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker and Robert Drew, he helped to create the shining interval that came to be known as cinema-verité. He made his first movie at the age of 14, and he never stopped filming until his death in 2011 at the age of 89. In Leacock's hands, the camera became an astonishingly sensitive instrument. A lot has been made of his work as a cameraman on Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story, but his greatest influence was the ceaselessly changing world itself and the equipment he used to record and interpret certain of its events.

The films in this DVD collection were made after Leacock retired from teaching at MIT and moved to Paris, where he met his great love and creative collaborator Valerie Lalonde. The then-new Video-8 cameras delivered them from the enormous costs of shooting on film, and with unlimited time, the energizing power of love and the new lightweight equipment allowed them a freedom to film what had always interested them most — life itself, in all its beauty, charm and poignancy. This freedom is felt in every frame of every title in this collection, which spans the final period in Leacock's creative life. — Kent Jones

This 5-DVD set includes 11 films:

Les Oeufs à la Coque de Richard Leacock (91 min, 1991)

Inspired by both new love and Gulliver's Travels, Les Oeufs à la Coque (aka Richard Leacock's Soft-Boiled Eggs), is a ravishingly beautiful, important film about nothing in particular, a love song dedicated to France, French women in general and one Frenchwoman in particular, and a montage portrait of quotidian life in a country at peace.

A Musical Adventure in Siberia with Sarah Caldwell (56 min 2003)

In 1996, the First Lady of opera, Sarah Caldwell, invited her old friend and collaborator Richard Leacock to join her in Yektarinaberg, a previously closed Siberian industrial city, where she was preparing for the first-ever performance of a symphonic drama by Sergei Prokofiev of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

Mambo Madness (32 min, 1995)

The legendary 1960s supermodel Veruschka, aka Vera von Lehndorff, sets in motion a search for a long-lost all-female Communist Mambo band led by a blonde-haired, blue-eyed East German in this literally fabulous fantasy documentary conceived by Hans-Peter Litscher, the Swiss playwright, historian and polymath, and filmed by Leacock and Lalonde in Austria, Russia, France and Cuba.

Gott Sei Dank: A Visit with Helga Feddersen (30 min, 1993)

Years after the great-granddaughter of Richard Wagner introduced Leacock to Feddersen, the German comic actress and theatrical impresario, he and Lalonde visited her home in Hamburg while she was recuperating from a cancer surgery and filmed her talking about her life and times, her illness, and the beauty of forgiveness.

Kren - Parking (3 min, 1992)

A very short portrait of a work of art called Parking by the award-winning Slovak artist Matej Kren. Parking is made of mobile mirrors that reflect and invite reflection with confounding yet hypnotic visuals.

Les Vacances de Monsieur Leacock (20 min, 1992)

A lighthearted, charming visual diary of a cross-country road trip Leacock and Lalonde took across America, Les Vacances was made as a series of vignettes in places as diverse as Monument Valley, the ghostly mountaintop mining town Climax, Colorado, and Los Angeles.

A Celebration of St. Silas (25 min, 1993)

An offshoot of a separate collaboration about vicars for the BBC, this film follows the Anglican vicar who most delighted Leacock and Lalonde, as he prepares for and celebrates the heavenly birthday Mass of St. Silas, who brought the news that circumcision was not a prerequisite for entry to Heaven.

The Killings of Cariola (35 min, 1992)

Fascinated with process of rehearsal, Leacock and Lalonde watched and filmed as London's Cherub Company prepared a production of The Duchess of Malfi by Shakespeare's contemporary, John Webster.

Hooray! We're 50! (30 min, 1993)

A moving snapshot of Leacock's 50th reunion with the Harvard class of 1943, shot primarily by Lalonde and edited by Leacock (who majored in physics there), Hooray! We're 50! is a joyful look at the return from both war and life of an accomplished cast of graduates.

A Hole in the Sea (Le Trou dans la Mer) (30 min, 1994)

Shortly before the opening of the "Chunnel" linking England and France, Leacock and Lalonde were commissioned to film at both ends of the underwater project. They produced a light-hearted portrait of the effects of the massive project on life and the local landscapes, both physical and psychological.

Au Revoir, Marie Laure: Portrait of a Gallery at Work (42 min, 2006)

When she died in 1970, Marie Laure de Noailles left behind a legacy as a patron of the arts, muse of the surrealists and one of the great salonistes of Paris. Marie Laure's antiquaire Pierre Passebon invited her old friend Lalonde to film in the Galerie du Passage in Paris during the last week of an exhibition of Marie Laure's artworks and other possessions. The result was this sensitive meditation on art, friendship, permanence and transience.

Visit Infrastructure to see additional products in this category.

Water and the Dream of the Engineers

Fri, 24 Aug 2018 12:26:00 GMT

Water and the Dream of the Engineers
Buy Now: $320.00

From the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century to the climbing cancer rate of our time; from the colossal scale of New York City's aqueduct and water tunnels to the water wars of the West; from the dangers of chemical contamination to the water politics of Polanski's film Chinatown, Water and the Dream of the Engineers explores both the engineers' dreams for, and public fears about, the world we have inherited.

This is a fascinating documentary where rich social history frames a spirited debate between David Brower (former Sierra Club President), biologist Barry Commoner, and Able Wolman (dean of American Sanitary Engineering). The film's wider context is provided by the frustrations and concerns of those who maintain and use our water systems in the present day. The film is an educational odyssey about engineering, environmentalism, and the troubled relations between these two traditions. Most importantly, Water and the Dream of the Engineers reveals that conflicts over technology and the environment are, at root, debates about power and the promise of democracy.

A feature-length film in 4 sections for easy classroom use — Water can be shown to students in sections, with the aid of its companion study guide. Part Ia, "Water for All," documents the history of modern water and sewer systems; Part Ib, "Water Wars: California," explores the social conflicts of water systems in one part of the U.S.; Part IIa, "Upstream-Downstream: New Orleans," places one system's struggle with chemical pollution in the context of history; Part IIb, "The Sludge Dumpers," shows how the modern use of old sewer systems poses a threat to our water environment.

Visit Infrastructure to see additional products in this category.

Yindabad

Fri, 24 Aug 2018 12:26:00 GMT

Yindabad
Buy Now: $320.00

Yindabad deals with the flipside of Indian economic development, namely how an enormous construction project impacts an indigenous population. The Narmada Valley Development Project was created during the late 1960s to construct 30 large-scale dams, 135 medium-size dams and more than 3000 small-size dams in the Narmada River. Over 2.5 million people have been displaced by the flooding of forests, cultivatable land, and villages. The situation in Narmada Valley is an example of one of the biggest wars of the 21st century: water management and control of natural resources.

The affected people, the local Adivasis, have struggled against this project for 20 years, fighting for fair compensation and the relocation of their homes. India's current economic plans seem to be synonymous with the destruction of indigenous people's living conditions. As the cement walls stop the water that used to bring them life, the river floods the people for the sake of the city and development.

Adivasi women have gained consciousness of the dimensions of the problem and whilst fighting for the conservation of their culture, they have become main characters in this unequal fight. Yindabad shows this struggle from their viewpoint: from the riverbank, where the danger of rising water is a constant threat to the relocation process, and from the slum of the Indian metropolis, where the fight continues.

This documentary poses an alternative solution to this destructive development scheme - local instead of global development, and self-management instead of government control. The construction of small dams and the recovery of natural water deposits have transformed the deserted environment and restored water management to the local communities, opening the door to an encouraging future for its population.

Visit Infrastructure to see additional products in this category.