An analysis of the social upheaval of May 1968, made in the immediate wake of the workers’ and students’ protests. The picture consists of two parts, each with with identical image tracks, and differing narration.
Jean-Luc Godard brings his firebrand political cinema to the UK, exploring the revolutionary signals in late '60s British society. Constructed as a montage of various disconnected political acts (in line with Godard's then appropriation of Soviet director Dziga Vertov's agitprop techniques), it combines a diverse range of footage, from students discussing The Beatles to the production line at the MG factory in Oxfordshire, burnished with onscreen political sloganeering.
A student is held up in the library while a riot rages outside. As SDS protesters head to burn the library down, he has to fend them off with his baseball bat. This film opens with actual footage of civil disturbances in the 1960s, and moves on to images of historical American figures.
Contrasting radical mobs, anarchy, and 1960s counterculture with footage of American manufacturing and innovation, this film celebrates the concept of American exceptionalism and argues that anti-Vietnam War protesters were influenced by communism, atheism, and immorality. Set mostly in a university library, this political debate between a medical student, his 1770s ancestor, and a history professor is a sequel to the 1972 National Education Program film, Brink of Disaster! Two additional characters appear in this drama: a 19th-century steamboat captain, and the student’s grandfather - an early 20th-century automobile worker. The National Education Program at Harding College in Searcy, Arkansas created a variety of widely-distributed anti-communism films from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s.
L, a student in India witness to the government's violent response to university protests, writes letters to her estranged lover while he is away.
In 1969, the Renovación Universitaria movement and the subsequent raid on the Central University of Venezuela by the government of Rafael Caldera, triggered a strong wave of protest in the Institutes of Higher Education in Venezuela. This documentary collects part of the events that took place in the city of Mérida, Mérida State, where the University of the Andes is located.
In 1968 Joan Bakewell was one of the few female TV presenters, fronting the BBC's Late Night Line-Up and addressing daily the most pressing issues of the time. In this film she looks back at the events that led to what for many became the defining event of that extraordinarily turbulent year - the protests in France in May. While the rest of the world was in turmoil, with the Vietnam War causing increasing dissent, the Civil Rights movement growing in intensity and young people finding new ways of expressing themselves, as 1968 began it seemed to France's president, General de Gaulle, that his country was immune to the kind of protest sweeping the rest of the world.
Students seeking greater control over the hiring of faculty occupy the offices of the Political Science Department at McGill University. The film crew lives with the students and follows their action through confusion, argument, dissent, and negotiations with faculty. The result is an intimate view of a student political action.
The Renault factory in Belgium must close down. Nobody can believe it. We follow the investigations by the director who is at the heart of the action and who interviews main politicians, the workers who violently protest and the direction. In the fiction part the president-director of Renault, Schweitzer is killed by one of the workers.
David Gelb (Jiro Dreams of Sushi) tackles another venerable, beloved, and long-standing institution: the Mustang, crown jewel of the Ford fleet. Only this institution is in turmoil. As the fiftieth anniversary of the Mustang approaches and the car industry struggles through the deepest trough of the financial crisis, Ford launches a redesign. Now the jobs of workers at Ford’s Flat Rock Assembly Plant, the expectations of the thousands of Mustang devotees, and the livelihood of the city of Detroit are all placed squarely on the shoulders of Dave Pericak. As chief program engineer, he will guide the 2015 Mustang from assembly floor to showroom—if only he can get that vibration out of the steering wheel.
Refuge(e) traces the incredible journey of two refugees, Alpha and Zeferino. Each fled violent threats to their lives in their home countries and presented themselves at the US border asking for political asylum, only to be incarcerated in a for-profit prison for months on end without having committed any crime. Thousands more like them can't tell their stories.
Exploring police brutality and institutional hostility towards Arab and Muslim students, this documentary reveals how the University of Michigan's broad trends of surveillance transform a sanctuary into a symbol of systemic oppression.
A documentary about the end of the student movement in 1972 and the lynching of Daizaburo Kawaguchi, a student at Waseda University. The documentary interweaves testimonies from japanese intellectuals and a short play, written and directed by Shôji Kôkami, about the murder.
High Performance Imports checks out Tokyo Auto Salon 2002, tours Mine's factory and demonstrates drift action from Mitsui Mike plus an update on the HPI project car tuning.
Since its adoption in June 1955 by the Congress movement, the Freedom Charter has been the key political document that acted as a beacon and source of inspiration in the liberation struggle against Apartheid. It was reputedly the main source that informed democratic South Africa’s liberal constitution and a constant reference point for the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and rival political parties that it spawned since 1994, all claiming the Freedom Charter’s legacy. Freedom Isn’t Free assesses the history and role of the charter, especially in relation to key political and socio-economic aspects of developments in South Africa up to the present period. It includes rare archival footage with interviews of a cross-section of outspoken influential South Africans.
In April 1968, black and white students rebelled against the university administration, occupying five buildings, including the president's office in one of the first campus revolts of the Civil Rights/Vietnam War era. The revolt began as a protest against university expansion into neighboring communities and its role as a slum lord. After five days of student control, the administrators and trustees ordered the police to clear the buildings. What resulted was an unprecedented display of brutality and repression. Narrated by one of the student rebels, the detailed eyewitness account of this event galvanized other campus revolts around the country.