Subject: Industrialization
The shift from an agriculturally-based economy and lifestyle to one of manufacturing and mechanization yields complex transitions and impacts, both positive and negative.
À nous la liberté (Freedom for Us)
- Director: René Clair
- Release Date: 1931
- Production Country: France
Freedom isn't always easy to find, as the convict Louis finds out when he escapes prison, only to become saddled with the worries of a factory owner. Contemplating how to free himself from these new cares, he runs into his prison friend Emile who has also escaped and now labors in his factory; both men realize that they have not truly "escaped," but merely transferred from one prison to another.
Baksy (Native Dancer)
- Director: Gulshat Omarova
- Release Date: 2008
- Production Country: Russia, Kazakhstan, France, Germany
When a gas station is built on the land where she performs her rituals, Aidai, an elderly shaman and healer, fights back against the criminals who stole her land, using her only weapons: ritual and spiritual powers.
Bez strakha (Without Fear or Fearless)
- Director: Ali Khamrayev
- Release Date: 1971
- Production Country: Soviet Union
In 1929, an Uzbek Bolshevik officer attempts to modernize his village, beginning with having the women take off their chadors, but nothing is ever as simple or easy as it seems; the villagers resist, not understanding why they need to change their traditional ways.
Earthlings
- Director: Shaun Monson
- Release Date: 2005
- Production Country: United States
Hidden cameras document how the world's industry still relies heavily on the use of animals and animal products, from fur to medical research.
Food, Inc.
- Director: Robert Kenner
- Release Date: 2008
- Production Country: United States
Far from the small family farms most residents of the United States think of when they think of "farming," agriculture has become a billion-dollar-a-year business, with most farming done by corporations who contribute to an ever shrinking gene-pool of plants and animals that we rely upon to feed the world.
Life and Debt
- Director: Stephanie Black
- Release Date: 2001
- Production Country: United States
European colonial powers may no longer govern their former colonies, but colonialism still disrupts local economies, destroys indigenous industries, and devastates third world nations—now in the name of globalization. The tourist paradise Jamaica provides a locale for an in-depth look at the price of progress for many small, struggling nations.
Malls R Us
- Director: Helene Klodawsky
- Release Date: 2010
- Production Country: France, Canada
If shopping is a sacred activity in a consumer culture, then malls were intended to be the ultimate temples for the faith—yet they are being undermined if not destroyed entirely by the rise of Big-Box retailers in Western countries. So where have all the malls gone? Asia and the developing world, where their future seems as bright as it once did in the West.
Manufactured Landscapes
- Director: Jennifer Baichwal
- Release Date: 2006
- Production Country: Canada
Manufacturing is changing the world, the landscapes of this change provide an incredible inspiration, from factory workers in bright yellow assembled outside their workplace, to the ever expanding construction and waste that is fueled by the world's expanding consumption.
Modern Times
- Director: Charles Chaplin
- Release Date: 1936
- Production Country: United States
In a world where machines are rapidly replacing humans in the workforce, a man has difficulty keeping up with this new pace of modern life in the factory and on the streets; however, he muddles along with the sometimes questionable aid of a young woman, doing his best to understand and fit in to these new modern times.
Oliver Twist
- Director: David Lean
- Release Date: 1948
- Production Country: United Kingdom
Having run from the workhouse only to wind up on the streets of London, ten-year-old Oliver must rely upon his own determination (and the occasional kindness of befuddled, well-meaning strangers) as he tries first to escape and then simply to survive the machinations of Fagin, the evil master of a gang of pint-sized thieves and pickpockets who is mysteriously determined to ruin Oliver.
On a Clear Day
- Director: Gaby Dellal
- Release Date: 2005
- Production Country: United Kingdom
A laid-off Glasgow ironworker is determined to prove his worth by swimming the English Channel.
Powaqqatsi
- Director: Godfrey Reggio
- Release Date: 1988
- Production Country: United States
Modernization and industrialization have had great impacts on Third-World countries and result in great conflicts—and sometimes resolution—between tradition and modern culture, the present and the past.
Sicko
- Director: Michael Moore
- Release Date: 2007
- Production Country: United States
Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore takes on the United States for-profit health care system, examining the uninsured, the underinsured, and the overinsured, human beings all at one point or another victims of a system that cares more about the bottom line than the health of its customers.
Silent Running
- Director: Douglas Trumbull
- Release Date: 1972
- Production Country: United States
From a spaceship, a man fights to save the last of Earth's forests from being destroyed for commercial use.
Tri pesni o Lenine (Three Songs About Lenin)
- Director: Dziga Vertov
- Release Date: 1934
- Production Country: Soviet Union
Three anonymous folk songs sung about Lenin frame an early retrospective of his contributions to Soviet successes.
Up the Yangtze
- Director: Yung Chang
- Release Date: 2007
- Production Country: Canada
One girl leaves her family to find work, just as they are being displaced due to the rising waters behind the Three Gorges Dam. In another family, the son wants to earn more money than his parents do. Both find employment on one of the large cruise ships serving tourists on the Yangtze River; the cruise ship turns out to be an almost overwhelming world of consumption and privilege compared to what the kids left behind.
Wo die grünen Ameisen träumen (Where the Green Ants Dream)
- Director: Werner Herzog
- Release Date: 1984
- Production Country: West Germany, Australia
A young geologist is caught between science and myth when the mining company for which he works is confronted by aborigines. The geologist's job is to seek out potential deposits of uranium ore, however they plan to blast for ore samples at a site that is also sacred to the aborigines. Can the geologist, who believes wholeheartedly in science, ultimately defend the aboriginal belief in green ants who dream the world?
Workingman's Death
- Director: Michael Glawogger
- Release Date: 2005
- Production Country: Austria, Germany
For many modern-day workers, the danger of a life spent in hard labor is increasingly distant. But for others, such as coal miners in the Ukraine who crawl through 16" tunnels or laborers in Indonesia who haul sulfur from an active volcano, the danger is all too real; these humans have lives that contrast starkly with the safety and cleanliness most others in the modern world take for granted.
Zemlya (Earth)
- Director: Aleksandr Dovzhenko
- Release Date: 1930
- Production Country: Soviet Union
The rhythm of life in a Ukrainian village is violently interrupted by the institution of collective farming and the arrival of a tractor.