documentaries

Robert Pappas

USA | 2004 | 103mins | Beta | Colour

Asking whether America has entered an Orwellian world of doublespeak where out-right lies can pass for the truth, Pappas explores what the media doesn't like to talk about: itself. Meticulously tracing the process by which media has distorted and often dismissed actual news events, Pappas presents a riveting and eloquent mix of media professionals and leading intellectual voices on the media and provides a vital forum for ideas that will never be heard in mainstream media.

From the very size of the media monopolies and how they got that way to who decides what gets on the air and what doesn't, the film moves through a troubling list of questions and news stories that go unanswered and unreported in the mainstream media. Are Americans being given the information a democracy needs to survive or have they been electronically lobotomized? Has the frenzy for media consolidation led to a dangerous irony where in an era of more news sources the majority of the population has actually become less informed?

A marvel of passionate succinctness, Robert Kane Pappas' documentary critically exam-ines the Fourth Estate, once the bastion of American democracy. - Variety

Robin Scovill

USA | 2003 | 86mins | Beta | Colour

By 1990, one in five US hetrosexuals will be dead from AIDS (Oprah Winfrey Show).

By 1991, HIV will have spread to ten mil-lion Americans (Newsweek, 1986).

By 1992, one in ten American babies will be AIDS victims (USA Today, 1988).

Why have these and other dire predications about HIV and AIDS never come true?

Robin Scovill's documentary presents the hotly-debated argument that HIV may not be the cause of AIDS. Contending that the mainstream scientific community has never established direct proof of the HIV/AIDS connection, the film offers numerous pieces of evidence pointing to the possibility of another etiology for the disease. Scovill's thesis is most convincing when presenting the numerous stories of HIV+ persons living healthy lives without the use of medication. Cogent and thought-provoking, The Other Side Of AIDS pushes for healthy scientific skepticism in the face of a 20-year-old system of entrenched HIV/AIDS thought.

Nina Davenport

USA | 2003 | 98mins | Beta | Colour

Filmmaker Nina Davenport should have witnessed the devastation of the Twin Towers from her nearby apartment. Instead she was working in California. Suffering from 'Survivor's guilt' she makes the trip back home with her camera. Along the route, which takes in such landmarks as the Grand Canyon, Texas, the National Atomic Museum, Waco and Oklahoma, she stops to talk with strangers who end up sharing their own personal stories of loss - and with astonishing candor: a woman tells of losing custody of her children, a veteran describes his battle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a cowboy reveals that his mother murdered his father.

Touching on a wide range of subjects -from the meaning of love to the horror of the atomic bomb - what begins as the story of one New Yorker's journey home in the aftermath of tragedy becomes a portrait of American identity and history. The title of the film refers to the lines in the road, the personal story lines that paralleled the nation's story, and the twin towers themselves; in this poignant and personal documentary; those lines reveal heartache, humour, surprise, and above all, the drive to endure.