Documentaries I have loved

xxp

I found Century Of Self quite mindblowing. I'd never heard of Edward Bernays and all that engineering of consent stuff before watching it.

i watched "avenge but one of my two eyes" over the weekend. excellent.

finally saw Harlan County, USA

one of the all-timers obv

morbs otm

harlan county usa is so great, saw it for first time today & cannot stop thinking about it

also thank you to this movie for introducing me to hazel dickens <3

saw Sherpa last night after my brother recommended it a few weeks ago. Quite moving and also quite disgusting how little regard teh sherpas are treated with by the streams of people wanting to get to the top of Everest. Photos of the amount of people trying to climb resembled those of the lines trying to get into the Yukon for the goldrush.

Story of Plastics
saw this last summer and it hasa really scathing view of the continued cosntruction of single use plastics as well as the overly complex mixture of different plastics that go into packaging which make them very difficult to recycle.
Also goes into the whole idea of recycling overseas and what the reality is. They go to some place in Asia to see the effects and the actual process of recycling which is only used on a very small percentage of what is shipped because too much stuf can't be recycled as is. plus things get corrupted with dirt, foodstuffs etc and are therefore not able to be recycled even if they could be when pristine. Mouldy paper attached to plastic also a negative.
& plastic is still pushed by teh fossil fuels concerns. Time for a rethink.
I had seen a different doc on the effects of plastics on wildlife around the Atlantic how birds were flying thousands of miles on food runs only to come back with loads of plastic that wouldn't nourish their kids, how snails were building shells out of plastics and how the salination process of the oceans was being screwed up as plankton were processing plastics instead of their old process. So may have bits of that doc mixed up with bits of this.
BUt one takeaway I had , though possibly something I'd arrived at before, was plastic has been marketed asa disposable material since it was introduced only there is no easy way of disposing of it. Hope that changes soon, I am hearing some indications that there are ways of disposing of plastic underway but not fully established as yet.

I saw several green docs last year about the ecosystem and how things grow in good soil I think these included Soil, Dirt and Growth.
All of which seem to be really good indications of how things should be looked at and why one should move away from the monoculture that has been a farming method during mass production. Because it is detrimental to teh state of the soil that one needs to grow things in.

Tomorrow an English language version of a documentary originally released as Demain
A look into various aspects of systems theory and the work of Joanna Macy.
Has some really interesting things turning up Finland Education system, local area currency, biodiversity and several other things. Worth a watch.

I put off watching Collective on Hulu for weeks, thinking an expose of corruption in Romania couldn't be all that shocking. But it's great as cinema, and pretty appalling as well.

oh, that was on BBC4 recently as part of the Storyville strand, so the pvr picked it up on my season pass. but i've not watched it yet.

it's still available on iplayer here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000tpzn

other recent things on the same season pass, the one about the 80 year old mole undercover in the rest home, which was great.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000th7v

and the one about Goebbels's 103 year old secretary which i thought was really short on details but she had such a striking face.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00052bf

just watched Collective. started with a literal sparkler, went big places. but the end was gutting. still 7 months left to watch on iplayer.

(actually, both the ones i mentioned above were up for the documentary oscar, both lost out to the octopus teacher thing)

(both = collective and mole agent, i didn't notice i'd also mentioned Goebbels' secretary)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000kxl0/storyville-united-skates

"When America's last standing roller rinks are threatened with closure, a community of thousands battles in a racially charged environment to save an underground subculture - one that has remained undiscovered by the mainstream for generations, yet has given rise to some of the world's greatest musical talent."