documentaries

Michael Burns

USA | 2004 | 66mins | DVD | Colour

Preventive Warriors is an in-depth look at the National Security Strategy of the Bush Administration, the 2002 document that serves as the blueprint for pre-emptive US wars of the present and future. Though interviews with the world's leading authorities from the left and the right, including Noam Chomsky, Taqi Ali, Cliff May, and Seth Liebsohn, the film looks at how the new, bold, aggressive policies behind the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq may have a lasting impact on the course of human history.

David Lebrun

USA | 2003 | 60mins | 35mm | Colour

As a young man, biologist and artist, Ernst Haeckel found himself torn between seeming irreconcilables: science and art, materialism and religion, rationality and passion, outer and inner worlds. Through his discoveries beneath the sea, Haeckel would eventually reconcile these dualities, bringing science and art together in a unitary, almost mystical vision. His work would profoundly influence not only biology but also movements, thinkers and authors as disparate as Art Nouveau and Surrealism, Freud and Lawrence, Lenin and Edison. The key to Haeckel's vision was a tiny undersea organism called the radiolarian. Proteus explores their metamorphoses and celebrates their stunning beauty and seemingly infinite variety in animation sequences based on Haeckel's graphic work.

Around Haeckel's story, Proteus weaves a tapestry of poetry and myth, scientific history and spiritual biography. The legend of Faust and the alchemical journey of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner are part of the story, together with the laying of the transatlantic telegraphic cable and the epic oceanographic voyage of HMS Challenger.

Makes audiences contemplate the majestic vastness of the natural universe and its complex artistic perfection in ways that even Haeckel could only have imagined. - Variety

Desmond Bell

Ireland | 2004 | 65mins | Beta | Colour

An anti-war film set in the US which sets America's immigrant communities up against the national security state. The war in question is the First World War and the anti-war protesters the Irish and Finnish miners of Butte, Montana a copper mining town high in the Rockies. Butte's mines are the centre of the US war machine.

Drawing on eye witness testimony, reminiscence and interpretative comment to tell the gripping story of their struggle and betrayal, interwoven with a rich seam of archival images, both moving and still, to relate the traumatic events taking place in Butte during 1917- the anti-war protest, the Speculator Mine disaster, the subsequent miners strike, the lynching of labour activist Frank Little and imposition of martial law.

The film, neither documentary nor pure fic-tion, poses a series of searching questions about this almost forgotten chapter in US history when the still not assimilated immigrant working class found itself up against corporate America. It takes as its inspiration Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, he drew upon his experinces in Butte to fashion a vivid picture of corruption in the industrial city.