Screenings
Preview Screening: Full Battle Rattle
Fake Town. Real War
Full Battle Rattle is the story of a real war and a fake town. In California’s Mojave Desert, the US Army has built a ‘virtual Iraq’ – a billion dollar urban warfare simulation – and populated it with hundreds of Iraqi role-players. Army units spend three weeks inside the simulation before deploying to Iraq.
Preview Screening: Bulletproof Salesman
“Everyone lives by selling something” – Robert Louis Stevenson
It’s March 2003, Iraq, and Fidelis Cloer is a businessman in search of the perfect war. In fact he’s going out of his way to find trouble so that he can sell armoured cars to the military and aid organisations attempting to restore some order to the chaotic capital. Along with several colleagues and an arsenal of small arms fire to help them on the way, Cloer, you may have guessed is no ordinary salesman.
SNEAK PREVIEW SCREENING: US Election Special – Frost/Nixon
On the night before the 56th US election Frontline is pleased to present Frost/Nixon – the film adaptation of Peter Morgan’s hugely successful stage play. Oscar winning director Ron Howard brings this remarkable story to the screen, not only recreating the on-air interview, but also showing the motivations of both men, and the around-the-world, behind the scenes maneuvering and machinations at play.
Sneak Preview Screening: Silly Money with Bremner, Bird and Fortune – FULLY BOOKED
Money has never been more powerful. It has also never been less understood, even by those whose job it is to understand it. In the absence of an easy text that puts the pieces together, Bremner, Bird and Fortune have assembled a satirical look at a system which is at one and the same time, both astonishingly sophisticated, and astonishingly stupid.
Sneak Preview Screening: Inside the Saudi Kingdom – FULLY BOOKED
Inside the Saudi Kingdom is a revelatory film that achieves exclusive access to the private and public life of Prince Saud bin Abdul Mohsen bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud one of the 20 princes that run modern day Saudi Arabia.
Preview Screening: Darfur Between the Lines
With Darfur’s peace agreement in tatters and the sound of gunfire still ringing in the air, this eye-opening, exclusive film goes deep into the territory to reveal a people struggling desperately for life yet determined to carry on in the face of danger and hardship.
Screening: Trial of a Child Denied
Trial of a Child Denied is a gritty investigation into the coerced sterilisation of Roma women in the Czech Republic.
Screening: Bad Voodoo’s War
An eye-opening film that virtually embeds with California based National Guard soldiers of Bad Voodoo Platoon in Iraq to tell their personal war stories in Bad Voodoo’s War. From private reflections to real-time footage of IED attacks on the ground, renowned war documentary director Deborah Scranton (The War Tapes) gives cameras to the soldiers of the Bad Voodoo Platoon, and intimately reveals the grind of their war.
Screening: Shooting the Messenger
In Shooting the Messenger Mike Nicholson and director/producer Ian Stuttard, two veteran conflict reporters undertake an eye-opening journey into what they claim is the deliberate targeting of journalists and crews in conflict zones from Sri Lanka to Zimbabwe and the Middle East.
Screening: Triage – Dr James Orbinski’s Humanitarian Dilemma
The act of triage is the ultimate humanitarian nightmare. Racing against time with limited resources, relief workers make split-second decisions: who gets treatment; who gets food; who lives; who dies. In Triage: Dr. James Orbinski’s Humanitarian Dilemma, director Patrick Reed follows Dr. James Orbinski on a heart-wrenching journey back to the lands and people whose life-and-death struggle marked him forever.
FULLY BOOKED – Preview Screening: Cambodia Dreams
Eighteen years in the making, Cambodia Dreams is the stunning documentary by Stanley Harper about a Cambodian family divided by the proxy war that ravaged the country in the 1970’s and led to civil war and revolution.
FULLY BOOKED – Feature Film Screening: Shake Hands With the Devil
Shake Hands with the Devil is the story of Canadian commander, General Romeo Dallaire, torn between his duty and his conscience when he finds himself eyewitness to hell on earth, leading the UN peacekeeping mission during the Rwandan genocide of 1993. It is based on Dallaire’s award winning book and directed by Roger Spottiswoode.
Somalia Season Screening: Lost Boys
Lost Boys is a powerful documentary about the young Somali men of London who, alienated in their community and detached from their faith, are turning to ever more violent forms of street crime.
Somalia Season Screening: The Warlords Next Door?
In this extraordinary investigation, Aidan Hartley sets off to find four senior figures in Somalia’s Western backed government who all enjoy close links to Britain. It’s a journey that takes them from the streets of Birmingham and Leicester to the centre of Mogadishu, a city so dangerous that he and director Jim Foster are the only Western journalists on the ground.
Forgotten Season: Screening – Juarez, City of Dreams
Situated across the Rio Grande from the US city of El Paso, Texas, Ciudad Juarez is one of the largest border towns on earth with one million desperately poor and maligned inhabitants.
Documentary filmmaker Alex Tweddle and cameraman James Buck travel through the city to find out why people flock to the city and what life is like for those living in one of Mexico’s most violent and unstable cities.
Forgotten Season: Screening – The Other Side of the Country
“What do you do when war engulfs you and your government says there is no war?”
Uganda is the setting and the population is the battleground in Catherine Hebert’s carefully conceived film, which shows what it means to live through a war carried out by rebels and played down and drawn out by a complicit government.
Forgotten Season: Screening – Deserted: The Story of a Forgotten People – Western Sahara
Deserted is a series of short films based on different encounters with the forgotten Saharawi people of Western Sahara – a territory in north-west Africa that is subject of a decades long dispute between Morocco and the Algerian backed Polisario Front.
Forgotten Season: Screening – Andijan: A Massacre Foretold, Forgiven, Forgotten
We knew he was a bastard, with 10,000 political prisoners and opponents being boiled to death.
But he was our bastard – a close partner in the War on Terror.
Then he massacred 1.000 peaceful demonstrators. We had never told him he couldn’t and hardly slapped his wrist when he did.
Doesn’t that make us responsible?
Andijan: A Massacre Foretold, Forgiven, Forgotten is a single narrative, investigative report into the relationship between the West and Uzbekistan, one of the US’ key allies in the War on Terror.
The relationship was called into question when Uzbek troops fired on a crowd of peaceful demonstrators in the Eastern town of Andijan and began to cover the incident up.
Forgotten Season: Screening – A Story of People in War and Peace
A Story of People in War and Peace is an eloquent and emotional film about coping with war and its consequences, seen from the perspective of its participants.
The backdrop is the Nagorno Karabakh conflict – a vicious turfwar between Armenia and Azerbaijan that attracted some attention in the West before it was swiftly forgotten amidst the collapse of communism in Russia.
Forgotten Season: Screening – My Daughter The Terrorist – FULLY BOOKED
What makes anyone want to blow themselves up for a cause? In this intimate and personal portrait we join two young female elite soldiers trained for the ultimate mission.
We share their childhood experiences, their dreams and their families’ loss. Left behind are the mothers and a population still coming to grips with life under a conflict largely overlooked by the rest of the world.
Forgotten Season: Premiere Screening – The Path of Most Resistance
FIRST PUBLIC SCREENING: Fighting war is a grim business and with major operations ongoing in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US Army isn’t keen to lose any of its recruits. But what happens when a soldier decides they can no longer fight? The Path of Most Resistance tackles the subject of conscientious objection by following two servicemen who applied for objector status. Only one was successful.
Forgotten Season: Screening – Bolivia: Looking for the Revolution
Director Rodrigo Vazquez’ film Looking for the Revolution runs between 2001 and 2007 in search of the socialist revolution that was abruptly halted with the murder of Che Guevara in 1967, leaving the indigenous peoples’ dreams of freedom in tatters and forgotten by the outside world.
Forgotten Season: Screening – Welcome to Hebron
Filmed during more than three years on location, Welcome to Hebron focuses on the life of determined 17 year-old Leila Sarsour and dispels western stereotypes, which often portray Arab women as weak and victimised.
Screening: Hard Way Home
The collapse of Iraq into sectarian violence after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein drove more than four million Iraqis from their homes. Many of the country’s middle class are now refugees in Syria and Jordan. If these engineers, teachers, doctors and shop owners are not helped to survive in exile and eventually return to their homes, Iraq may never recover.
Preview Screening: Up the Yangtze
A luxury cruise boat motors up the Yangtze — navigating the mythic waterway known in China simply is “The River.” The Yangtze is about to be transformed by the biggest hydroelectric dam in history.
The Three Gorges Dam — contested symbol of the Chinese economic miracle — provides the epic backdrop for Up the Yangtze, a feature documentary on life inside the 21st century Chinese dream.
Screening: Tortured Truth
Tortured Truths is the story of La Maison des Journalistes, a Parisian refuge for persecuted journalists from all over the world who have suffered torture, prison sentences and death threats because they dared to express themselves freely.
NEW Screening: Rebellion – The Litvinenko Case
The dark secrets of the Kremlin unravel in this story of the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko poisoned in November 2006 in London told in his own words and in interviews with his widow, his friends and his alleged killers. A story especially prescient given the recent leaks from MI5, which suggested that the assassination may have had approval from the Russian state.
Sneak Preview Screening: Car Bomb, A History with ex-CIA agent Robert Baer
"The most shocking film you will ever see…"
Forget about nuclear missiles, the decisive weapon of the twentieth century is the car bomb. In his startling new film Car Bomb ex-CIA agent Robert Baer, whose life was depicted by George Clooney in the Oscar-winning movie Syriana, for the first time uncovers the history of this extraordinary weapon.
Preview Screening: The Qu’ran – A Film by Antony Thomas
In this powerful and stunningly beautiful film, The Qur’an, award-winning director, Antony Thomas takes us into the heart of the Muslim world and through the personal lives of people, living according to their understanding of the Qur’an.
The range of witnesses and experiences is extraordinary — from Ayatollahs and Grand Imams to simple farmers; from women in positions of power to women living in veiled seclusion; from those who speak of the Qur’an’s uncompromising message of peace and tolerance to those who find justification in the text for violent conflict and suicide bombing.
Frontline Screening at the Curzon Soho: Preview – Standard Operating Procedure
Based on the book by Philip Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure is an Errol Morris film about the abuse of prisoners at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
Critic, Roger Ebert has said, “After twenty years of reviewing films, I haven’t found another filmmaker who intrigues me more…Errol Morris is like a magician, and as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini.”
