Preview – 'WHY INTELLIGENCE FAILS'
Friday 7th January – 7.30pm
Followed by a Q&A with Neil Cameron, series producer and Paul Mitchell, executive producer. All film directors of this four part series will also be present on the night.
Duration: 47 minutes

UK preview and production party for 'Why Intelligence Fails' before the UK transmission begins on the Discovery Channel on the 8th January 2005.

At a time of unprecedented upheaval in the intelligence community, the Discovery Channel has assembled unparalleled cast of intelligence experts from around the world to answer the question of why intelligence goes wrong and what we can learn from the mistakes. These aren't academics or journalists - they gained their knowledge from the inside.

The series is composed of four independent programmes of three stories each. We will be screening Part Three, ‘Backfire’.

Backfire
Presidents and Prime Ministers often call on their secret services to solve their most sticky problems oversees. But what happens if the intelligence agencies overreach themselves - or get caught? All too often these covert operations ends in scandal and tears – backfire.

This programme tells the story of intelligence disasters including President Mitterrand's desire to rid himself of some Greenpeace protesters, and how that ended up in death and the destruction of several ministers' careers; how the East German Stasi managed to place a spy in the office of their best friend in West Europe Willy Brandt, only to cause his government to fall; and why the American "counter-insurgency" campaign in Central America ended in assassinations, torture, and defeat.
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Screening – Frontline Programme 1: LAOS
Monday 10th January - 7.30pm
Following by Q&A with Ruhi Hamid, film director
Duration - 30 minutes

“On the third day we finally got to the village and the emotional meeting was beyond any comprehension. Adult men and elders, women and children, with their hands clasped were weeping and prostrating themselves to us, showing their wounds and pleading for help - “We waited 30 years for you to come here, like children waiting for parents”.

Laos in South-East Asia, with a population of 5.6million, is the scene of a conflict between the ethnic minority ‘Hmong’ people and the government, which has been running for almost 30 years.

Ruhi Hamid entered Laos undercover, commissioned to document the lives and plight of the Hmong rebels, CIA Secret War veterans who had fought alongside the Americans during the Vietnam War. Following their guides, Ruhi and her husband Misha Maltsev trekked through the forests of Laos before coming across a Hmong community living in the jungle. These, the first televised images of a hunted, poverty-stricken people are deeply moving.

The documentary was broadcast on BBC2 in March 2004 and selected as a finalist for the Rory Peck awards 2004. After transmission, Ruhi Hamid was invited to the French Assemblee Nationale and to the United Nations in New York to present the film and give a witness account to a special Inter-Agency grouping, which addresses conflicts.
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Preview – ‘Red Lines and Deadlines’
Monday 17th January – 7.30pm
Followed by a Q&A with Taghi Amirani, film director
Duration – 53 minutes

Twenty-five years after the Islamic Revolution, Iran is struggling for reform. ‘Red Lines and Deadlines’ films behind the scenes with the young reporters of Iran’s leading pro-reform newspaper. Founded a year ago and already Iran’s fourth-largest daily, Shargh, which means “East,” has quickly built a loyal readership among Iran’s intellectuals, opinion makers, politicians, and the young.

With its youthful staff (the average age is 25), high number of female journalists, and a commitment to professional journalism and neutral reporting, Shargh is a lightning rod for censorship. And there are severe consequences to attracting the attention of the country’s censors: in the past four years, over a hundred reformist newspapers have been shut down. Authorities have closed Shargh once already, on the eve of the February 20, 2004 parliamentary election, for printing an open letter from reformist MPs to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei criticizing the disqualification of more than 2,000 reformist candidates. Now, Shargh’s own editors scrupulously evaluate all their articles, trying to ensure against crossing any “red lines,” which is what Iranian journalists call the strict but ill-defined boundaries that mark the topics, opinions and even writing styles considered off-limits by the country’s conservatives.

The film documents three weeks in the life of this remarkable newspaper, following reporters on stories ranging from Saddam Hussein’s first appearance in court, to the trial of a professor sentenced to death for criticizing the ruling clerics, to the death of Marlon Brando. The story of these daring journalists, who struggle to report the news without incurring the “blade of censorship,” offers powerful insight into the complexities of today’s Iran.

‘Red Lines and Deadlines’ was broadcast on PBS as part of the Wide Angle series in September 2004. The film hasn’t yet been broadcast in the UK

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Screening – ‘Blind Flight’
Monday 24th January - 7.30pm
Following by Q&A with John Furse, director and John McCarthy, journalist
Duration - 90 minutes

Blind Flight is the true account of the kidnapping of Brian Keenan and his subsequent captivity with John McCarthy in the Lebanon in 1986. Brian Keenan and John McCarthy spent four and a half years together, confined underground and chained to the wall of their cell. The two men, pawns in a game of international politics, were utterly different in personality, physical appearance and background.

The bullish working-class Irish Republican Keenan, who went to the Lebanon as a teacher to escape the horrors of Belfast, and his youthful English cellmate, the handsome, charming, upper-class McCarthy, a journalist ironically reporting on Keenan's own captivity, could easily have found each other at opposite ends of a gun barrel in the streets of Keenan's Belfast. Instead, in the face of the most acute deprivation and under the constant threat of death at the hands of their captors, they forged a relationship that transcended all that appeared to divide them. Blind Flight tells the compelling story of this extraordinary relationship as both men resurrect their deepest memories, feelings, fears and loves which makes the film a 'love story' in the fullest and most humanistic sense.

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Screening – The Corporation
Monday 31st January - 7.30pm
Duration - 145 minutes

Winner of the Audience Award – Sundance Film Festival

One hundred and fifty years ago, the corporation was a relatively insignificant entity. Today, it is a vivid, dramatic and pervasive presence in all our lives. Like the Church, the Monarchy and the Communist Party in other times and places, the corporation is today’s dominant institution. But history humbles dominant institutions. All have been crushed, belittled or absorbed into some new order. The corporation is unlikely to be the first to defy history.

In this complex and highly entertaining documentary, Mark Achbar, co-director of the influential and inventive MANUFACTURING CONSENT: NOAM CHOMSKY AND THE MEDIA, teams up with co-director Jennifer Abbott and writer Joel Bakan to examine the far-reaching repercussions of the corporation’s increasing preeminence.

Based on Bakan’s book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, the film is a timely, critical inquiry that invites CEOs, whistle-blowers, brokers, gurus, spies, players, pawns and pundits on a graphic and engaging quest to reveal the corporation’s inner workings, curious history, controversial impacts and possible futures. Featuring illuminating interviews with Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn and many others, THE CORPORATION charts the spectacular rise of an institution aimed at achieving specific economic goals as it also recounts victories against this apparently invincible force.

“Surprisingly rational’
The Economist

“May do for big business what jaws did for sharks”
The Daily Telegraph

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Screening – ‘Get the Picture’
Monday 7th February – 7.30pm
Followed by Q&A with Rupert Wyatt, Director and Adrian Sturges, Producer
Duration: Short, 11 minutes followed by the ‘making of’, 10 minutes

Get The Picture is an intense portrayal of a photographer in a war zone. The short film, which stars Brian Cox and Lloyd Owen, is based on the opening scenes of a feature from writer/director Rupert Wyatt.

Two war correspondents are escorted to a recently bombed town. The apparent perpetrators are about to be executed in front of a baying mob of survivors. One journalist doubts the guilt of the adolescent prisoners; the other believes they are not there to take sides but to take pictures... A group of prisoners are about to be executed in front of a photographer and journalist. Are they there purely to report or is their presence inciting the event?

Get The Picture was funded by the Film Council and FilmFour's Cinema Extreme scheme, which aims to encourage filmmakers with an original vision. A feature film based on the short is currently being developed.
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Screening – La Bataille d’Alger / The Battle of Algiers
Monday 14th February - 7.30pm
Duration - 123 minutes

Fighting for Independence

One of the most influential films in the history of political cinema, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers focuses on the harrowing events of 1957, a key year in Algeria’s struggle for independence from France. Shot in the streets of Algiers in documentary style, the film vividly recreates the tumultuous Algerian uprising against the occupying French in the 1950s. As violence escalates on both sides, the French torture prisoners for information and the Algerians resort to terrorism in their quest for independence. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, women plant bombs in cafés. The French win the battle, but ultimately lose the war as the Algerian people demonstrate that they will no longer be suppressed.

Shot on location, and starring actual FLN rebels, "The Battle of Algiers" is one of the most viciously realistic films of all time. Initially banned by the French government, it quickly won wide acclaim: an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film and garnishing 11 international awards.

“If you want to understand what’s happening right now in Iraq, I recommend The Battle of Algiers.”
Former national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski

‘Legendary. Riveting. A great movie’
The New York Times

‘Breathtaking. Stunningly Provocative. Electrifyingly timely.’
Peter Rainer, New York Magazine