Back in January of 2013, Laura Poitras a documentary filmmaker who received the MacArthur Genius Fellowship award in 2012 and shared a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service was a few years into creating a documentary about the increase in surveillance America saw post 9/11 when she suddenly received several encrypted e-mails from a mysterious source, calling themselves "citizen fou
The Crisis of Civilization is a dark comedy remix mash-up bonanza about the end of industrial civilization. A documentary feature film investigating how global crises like ecological disaster, financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages are converging symptoms of a single, failed global system.http://crisisofcivilization.comACCLAIM: “A unique film. Everyo
Getting into North Korea was one of the hardest and weirdest processes VBS has ever dealt with."After we went back and forth with their representatives for months, they finally said they were going to allow 16 journalists into the country to cover the Arirang Mass Games in Pyongyang.Then, ten days before we were supposed to go, they said, No, nobody can come. Then they said, OK, OK, you ca
2008 Emmy Award-winning Dispatches story of an estimated 15,000 children in Africa's Niger Delta being denounced by Christian pastors as witches and wizards and then killed, tortured or abandoned by their own families. Two-and-a-half-year-old Ellin is one such child. Found at the side of the road, her body having been severely burnt with boiling water. Nwanakwo, eight years old, had acid poured ov
The Aokigahara Forest is the most popular site for suicides in Japan. After the novel Kuroi Jukai was published, in which a young lover commits suicide in the forest, people started taking their own lives there at a rate of 50 to 100 deaths a year. The site holds so many bodies that the Yakuza pays homeless people to sneak into the forest and rob the corpses. The authorities sweep for bodies only
Issei Sagawa murdered an innocent woman and spent three days eating her flesh. Due to loopholes in the law, Issei is a free man to this day.On the afternoon of June 13, 1981, a Japanese man named Issei Sagawa walked to the Bois de Boulogne, a park on the outskirts of Paris, carrying two suitcases. The contents of those suitcases, to the lament of a nearby jogger, was the dismembered body of a
Future by Design shares the life and far-reaching vision of Jacque Fresco, considered by many to be a modern day Da Vinci. Peer to Einstein and Buckminster Fuller, Jacque is a self-taught futurist who describes himself most often as a "generalist" or multi-disciplinarian -- a student of many inter-related fields. He is a prolific inventor, having spent his entire life (he is now 90 years old) conc
Very Young Girls, whose title reflects the fact that in the United States the average age of entry into prostitution is just thirteen. The film takes us into the work of a former sexually exploited youth-turned-activist named Rachel Lloyd, who started the New York City organization GEMS (Girls Educational and Mentoring Services) to help victimized young women escape their pimps and find another wa
This is the story about a convicted Satmar drugdealer who after his release from prison tries to get back into hes community. Although he doesn’t sound like the smartest cookie out there, and that’s probably the reason he was chosen to do the things he did with the drugs. And it’s a little obvious that he doesn’t want to fully integrate into the community he wants to eat the cake and have it (no p