Documentaries to Make You Lose What Little Faith You Had Left in the Government

2016 has been a terrifying year so far—what with the most ridiculous, high stakes presidential race in history, wars raging all over the world, a global immigration crisis, and the nagging feeling that we just aren’t quite doing enough to tackle that climate change thing. It’s enough to make you lose faith in every institution you once trusted, and that’s exactly the premise of a new film program at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), titled Lies and Secrets.

Lies and Secrets is composed of four recent documentaries that cut through the noise and take a long hard look at the consequences of government actions around the world. For ACMI’s Head of Film Programs, James Hewison, documentary films play a crucial role in a media environment saturated by exponentially more dread-inducing news stories.

“Film can be—and should be—an agent provocateur,” he tells The Creators Project. Hewison began planning for Lies and Secrets after a screening of Zero Days at the Berlin Film Festival. “It’s a film about the zeitgeist, structured very much in the fashion of a dense, muscular thriller,” he explains.

In the Zero Days, Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney investigates Stuxnet, a secret cyber weapon developed by the USA and Israel—not that they’d ever admit to it—and designed to bring down an Iranian nuclear facility. Stuxnet was able to infect computer systems around the world, behaving in the same way any computer worm can. It sets a precedent for what the wars of the future will look like—and it’s not a very pretty one.

In another documentary, National Bird: The Drone Wars, investigative journalist Sonia Kennebeck speaks to three former members of the military who were once instrumental in the USA’s drone program in Afghanistan, and are now haunted by their actions. Drone missions are now synonymous with modern warfare, but they’re also highly classified. The documentary provides rare insight into just how morally ambiguous some of those missions have been.

 Still from "Land of the Enlightenment"

Afghanistan also features in Land of the Enlightened, a detailed, provocative portrait of the children who live in the country’s mountain regions. Shot over the course of seven years, it follows four groups of children who live the lives of adults: trading explosives, trafficking opium, and contending with the constant presence of foreign soldiers.

The final film of the program, Jim: The James Foley Story, pays tribute to American journalist James Foley. The reporter was kidnapped and murdered in Syria while working as a freelance war correspondent, and this intensely personal documentary about his life is directed by childhood friend Brian Oakes. Looking back on a courageous career, it features scenes shot in Foley’s New Haven hometown, and war zones in Syria and Libya—as well as candid interviews with those who knew him best.

Whether you’re a hardcore truther or just a concerned citizen feeling increasingly alarmed by recent news headlines, you’ll be compelled. “We want viewers to consider the concerns and complexities presented by each of the films and draw conclusions from the program as a whole,” Hewison says.

“It’s a coherent if diverse program of films about very immediate preoccupations and anxieties. Notions of essential ethics and morality.”

Lies and Secrets continues at ACMI Cinemas, Melbourne until October 25. Find out more and view the programme here.

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