Category: society

Adapting one of the most groundbreaking and powerful books of our time, Capital in the 21st Century is an eye-opening journey through wealth and power, that breaks the popular assumption that the accumulation of capital runs hand in hand with social progress, shining a new light on the world around us and its growing inequalities. Traveling through time from the French Revolution and other huge global shifts, to world wars and through to the rise of new technologies today, the film assembles accessible pop-culture references coupled with interviews of some of the world’s most influential experts delivering an insightful and empowering journey through the past and into our future.

Naturalist Chris Packham investigates the impact a growing human population is having on the planet, asking whether the earth can sustain predictions of ten billion people by 2050.

The world is fighting a deadly pandemic, but over in North America another heartbreaking public health crisis is still raging. A synthetic drug is killing more people than gun crime, homicide and car accidents combined.

The Elephant in the Living Room is an American documentary film about the topic of exotic pets kept in homes in the United States and about the controversy surrounding this topic.

Social media are influencing the way women feel about their own bodies. Young women in particular are constantly being confronted with pictures of beautiful female bodies online – images which have almost always been digitally enhanced.

Searching for Sugar Man is a 2012 Swedish–British–Finnish documentary film about a South African cultural phenomenon, directed and written by Malik Bendjelloul, which details the efforts in the late 1990s of two Cape Town fans, Stephen “Sugar” Segerman and Craig Bartholomew Strydom, to find out whether the rumoured death of American musician Sixto Rodriguez was true and, if not, to discover what had become of him. Rodriguez’s music, which had never achieved success in the United States, had become very popular in South Africa although little was known about him in that country.

The film centers on the late-2000s financial crisis and the recovery stimulus, while putting forward an indictment of the then-current economic order in the United States and of unfettered capitalism in general. Topics covered include Wall Street’s “casino mentality”, for-profit prisons, Goldman Sachs’ influence in Washington, D.C., the poverty-level wages of many workers, the large wave of home foreclosures, corporate-owned life insurance, and the consequences of “runaway greed”.