Top 10 documentaries ever made

Assassination Nation

 

Not a lot of people know that the Philippines actually borrowed the US constitution when they were setting up their current political system, which is great, except for the fact that American politics has become highly contentious and intensely partisan.
But in the Philippines, they’re taking this to a whole new level. With more than 1,200 political assassinations in the last decade alone, the Philippines is one of the deadliest places on earth for politicians. So VICE sent Ryan Duffy to follow one of the nation’s most gunned-after candidates as he registers for reelection.
It’s election season in the Philippines, and for those bold enough to run for office, that means guns, armed convoys, and plenty of violence. Now, the Philippines is already the most dangerous place on earth to run for political office, because in a corrupt system, politicians can amass huge amounts of wealth and power if they hold top government positions. So as a result, they arm themselves to the teeth and build private militias, which, because of political infighting, turn the country’s provinces into full-on war zones.
This year, as America begins to wind down the war in Afghanistan, the longest war in US history, we’re seeing some very disturbing trends developed there. The Taliban have recently refined their terror tactics in such a way as to be almost unimaginable. VICE went to Kabul to see just what impact these new tactics are having.
The most successful suicide attack of all time was 9/11. In fact, it was powerful that it led to the US invasion of both Iraq and Afghanistan. 11 years ago, the US Army invaded Afghanistan with the sole purpose of getting Al Qaeda and Taliban. Today, the US government is entering into negotiations with the Taliban to see just how much power they will gain when our troops leave. This is a direct result of the Taliban’s successful use of terror techniques, suicide attacks, and suicide bombing.
Recently, the Taliban have adopted new strategies to wrap up suicide attacks, in an effort to gain even more leverage in their negotiations. They’ve discovered that using a new transportation device for their high explosives has proven very effective against the occupation. They’re using children.

From One Second to the Next

 

Xzavier is paralyzed from the diaphragm down. In the accident, part of his spinal cord was dissipated. His legs are gone, and the use of his right hand is partial. He woke up actually from the coma a lefty and he went in a righty. X is on life support. The ventilator has to breathe for him.
He doesn’t remember the accident as well as both his sister and his mom do. His sister was walking across the street with him on that October day. The driver who hit Xzavier was not only speeding in the school zone but she had also ran the stop sign because she was texting. The lady who hit X was texting. Her head was in her lap. She never even saw X in front of her. She actually came straight through the stop sign, there were no brake marks, no skid marks at all.
The Amish family was on their way at 8:00 in the morning. On the same road a van was driven by a young man from Bluffton, Chandler Gerber. He was on his way to a job and he was traveling about the speed limit. Police determined he was not speeding, just traveling along. He overtook the Amish and basically hit the Amish buggy from behind. As he was driving, Chandler was texting back and forth with his wife. He caused an accident that killed three people.
It was a Sunday night, Debbie had come out of her house to get her mail. By the big pine tree she was struck by a teenager texting and driving. Now she has no life really. Her balance is off, her arms don’t work very well, she’s got double vision, she cannot leave her yard. Debbie’s hospital bills have amounted to over one million dollars. She received just $50,000 from the liability insurance carried by the teenage girl who struck her. The driver was sentenced to 30 days in jail. She also got 5 months of house arrest, 500 hours of community service and that’s about it.
These are some of the stories that Werner Herzog portrayed in this It Can Wait documentary dedicated to horrors and victims of texting and driving.


 Consumed

 

Possibly the most unthinkable story of the last million years is the rise of the modern human culture. The cities we populate and the lives that we lead.
It is the environment that our children will inherit. But after a century of exponential growth in population and consumerism people are questioning the nature of modern life.
We’re beginning to doubt our motivations and we’re predicting environmental destruction. In understanding human nature our current concerns look smaller, more transient, with, potentially, a solution.
We’ve all got this weird mental illness called consumerism. We’ve all kind of gone collectively psychotic. Chasing status, in public, with people who don’t really care and neglecting your own lovers and friends and neighbours and kids.
The consumption of material items as a means to acquire status is as much of a trap as it is a set of freedoms. The pervasive nature of it has perhaps crossed the threshold of us being able to cope with it and process the information. The high street is actually a stressful, anxious place. We’re getting very little from it, but working incredibly hard to try and figure it all out.
We have the delusion that we really have deep insight into ourselves already. We’re very sophisticated now in the early 21st century, but we’re going to seem incredibly naïve in another hundred years.

 The Vanishing Tattoo

 

Two adventurers are forging their way into country that was home to perhaps the fiercest headhunters the world has ever known. These two Canadians are hot on the trail of some of the last remaining tribal tattoo masters. A small hand cut tattoo of only a few square inches takes many painful hours to pound into the flesh with a needle on a stick. But it’s been decades since anyone along the Skrang River has seen this rite performed.
These tattoo hunters won’t quit until they witness this vanishing ritual firsthand, even sacrificing themselves to the needles, if they have to, to keep this dying art form alive. Vince Hemington is a writer and now historian of tattoo lore. His partner, with the full body tattoo, is renowned tattoo artist Thomas Lockhart.
Tom’s been tattooing for a quarter of a century, while Vince is relatively new to the tattoo world, and what better place to start than Borneo. Borneo is the largest land mass between Australia and Asia, and it’s about as far from home as two Canadians can get. At just a single degree north of the equator, Vince and Thomas couldn’t have picked a much hotter place either.
Early explorers to Borneo told fabulous tales of incredible sites, none more frightening than the fabled wild man of Borneo. But the arrival of Europeans in the 19th and 20th centuries began to take the wild out of the warrior and the magic out of the indigenous culture. Some of that magic was tied up in tribal tattoos, marks so sacred that without them the people would become invisible to their gods. Just like those early explorers, Vince and Thomas head eastwards from Kuching along the edge of the South China Sea.
They thought they’d probably lose their bearings at some point on their three-week journey, but not that soon. Heavy smoke from forest fires on the Indonesian side of Borneo has completely obliterated the horizon. Placing their trust in the captain, they join in the only thing they’ve forgotten to do, pray for a safe passage.
They’re not sure what gods they’re invoking, or whose protection they’re seeking. But since they’ll be heading up a river once known as the River of Death, they figure they’ll need all the help they can get. This part of the journey ends 50 kilometers up the Skrang River at Pais. There, they’ve arranged to rendezvous with two brothers whom Thomas has often met at tattoo conventions around the world, Eddie and Simon David.

 My First Rifle

 

This is a documentary about the Cumberland County in South Kentucky, deep in the American boonies, far from the metropolitan life. A place where booze is neither sold nor consumed and the Holy Bible reigns supreme. In a village of 1800 people there are 40 churches. It is a religious, closed community, yet guns are a part of everyday life; for self defense and for hunting. Exposed from a very young age, it is common there to own your first gun in pre-school.
Cumberland County hit the front pages of news worldwide, when 5-year-old Christian Sparks shot his 2-year old sister dead with a weapon he received as a gift for his 5th birthday. A real gun, with real bullets, that manufacturers openly advertise for children as “My First Rifle.” While their mother was in the kitchen, Christian picked up his gun, and, unaware that it was still loaded, he accidentally shot his sister in the chest. Caroline was rushed to hospital, but tragically she died soon after.
The free possession of arms is hold as sacred in the U.S constitution, and it’s deeply entwined with the countryside life. Guns of all shapes and sizes, from handguns to semi-automatics are sold in Cumberland. And, of course, weapons made especially for children. Just around the corner from where Caroline Sparks was shot dead is one of the largest shooting grounds in the United States. At 8000 hectares, this shooting ground is larger than 11,000 football pitches.

Africa’s Cowboy Capitalists

 

Americans put a lot of stake in how they’re all about the frontier and that they have the frontier spirit. All of that is kind of in the history books now. But there is a group of individuals in America, and they still have that innate sense of going somewhere where it’s a bit rough and making a go of it. And that’s kind of what Ian Cox is doing. He was a small-time hustler operating out of Rumbek in Sudan. For about three or four years, he had an electronics shop in the middle of South Sudan – a place called Rumbek, probably the shittiest place in the world to do business.
His friend Tim had a Land Cruiser in Juba that he needed to sell. And with his mailing list, Cox advertised it and sold it. And then from there, one of the biggest armed security companies in South Sudan contacted him to provide 11 new Land Cruisers for a project they were just starting, which he did. And then it’s flowed on from there.
After decades of civil war between the mostly Arab Muslim north and mostly black Christian south, in 2005, the Bush administration successfully brokered an agreement ending the major conflict and creating separation and autonomy for the south. This led to a referendum in 2010 and independence for South Sudan in 2011. Despite its new status as a nation, South Sudan is still considered by some to be part of Sudan, which has long been on an embargo list for state-sponsored terrorism.
This embargo makes it nearly impossible to import anything that could be considered military equipment, even those subcontracting to the UN. This is where Ian’s years of experience navigating the murky political and social waters of Africa comes into play. He’s been contracted to move a convoy of military grade vehicles from South Africa to South Sudan across seven countries in 30 days.

 Empire of Secrets

 

Wiretaps without warrants. Surveillance of everyone. Who’s in charge and who’s watching the watchers? Will anything change? And does this massive spending actually make America more secure? In the next hour we’ll venture into a world of dark secrets and dirty wars, and reveal the ultimate secret of secrets in a democracy forced to choose between rights and security.
In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that America’s National Security Agency was listening in on, well, everybody. Everyone was shocked, deeply shocked. In 1971 America was in the midst of the war in Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers revealed that presidents from four administrations, the generals and intelligence services had all been lying about the Vietnam War. Everyone was deeply shocked.
More stories about the CIA and FBI spilled out of Watergate. Three separate investigations were launched. They discovered FBI agents in the Post Office steaming open letters without warrants, infiltrating civil rights and antiwar groups, destructing them using blackmail. The women’s movement became the target of political surveillance. The United States army had used more than 1,000 personnel to engage in domestic spying in the United States.
The CIA was also very active, operating inside the country, which was not permitted, going around the world conspiring to assassinate foreign leaders, and even enlisting the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro. The NSA was running Operation SHAMROCK, listening in on every electronic communication into and out of the United States without warrants and had been doing so for 30 years.
Many Americans who were not even suspected of crimes were not only spied upon, but they were harassed, they were discredited, and at times, endangered. Every day they’d get a whole computer disc, carry that down, physically down, to the NSA and they would listen to it and check out all the calls.
The NSA said they’d shut SHAMROCK down, but they hadn’t. Not really. In 1988, Duncan Campbell revealed that the NSA listening force had risen into the sky. They were now satellite-based, and they had a new name, ECHELON. Before anyone could get too shocked, 9/11 happened, and that prompt the president stepped forward to tell America, “I vow to do everything in my power to prevent another attack on our nation.”
The Bush administration seized the opportunity to reject all restraints and let slip the dogs of snooping. The head of the pack himself promised that, “Everything that NSA does is lawful and very carefully done.” For carefully, read secretly. No courts, no warrants, nothing to slow down the action. Anything’s lawful if no one knows about it. ECHELON was given a new lease of life and a new name, SOLAR WIND.
The Bush administration decided unilaterally it could engage in whatever electronic surveillance it wanted to. In 2007, Bush’s Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, claimed the program had been discontinued. People might not have really believed him, but it didn’t seem to matter because the next year America elected a new President with a completely “different” attitude to his predecessor.


Counter-Intelligence

 

It is no secret that CIA is engaged in criminal activities around the world, some of which are quite deadly, some of which are quite provocative in the sense of laying the groundwork for large scale military conflict, and it’s happening in a lot of countries. This is not unique to the United States. The United States learned some of this from the British who learned it in turn during the 19th century when they were a dominant imperial power around the world. They cut their teeth on this stuff.
The other major powers are definitely engaged and capable of these same types of operations, and small powers as well. Israel is an example. The CIA grew out of the OSS, which had been established during World War II. Its earliest years are interesting because the new president, Harry Truman, did not trust the OSS because he felt it was too dominated by parts of the Democratic Party that he didn’t align himself with, so he abolished the OSS. Then they first created a smaller intelligence agency from the remains of the old OSS called the Central Intelligence Group. And that was focused on analyzing intelligence. It wasn’t a covert operations agency.
In one inbox would come all information whether it was from intercepted communications, or satellite photography, or defector reports, or clandestine reports, embassy… it would all come to that one person, and that person would be “accountable.” One person would be accountable for looking at that stuff, pouring through it, and if it were important, assuming it was a good analysis, that could end up on the president’s desk the next morning, unadulterated synthesis of information.
About two years after that, many of the agents who had worked on the covert operation side, the paramilitary warfare operations, black operations, that sort of thing, were reestablished in an outfit called the Office of Policy Coordination. This “office” eventually grew to have about 5,000 agents in the early Cold War years, and the existence of this office was itself entirely top secret. It had no open existence at all, and it wasn’t until some years later that the Office of Policy Coordination was folded into the CIA, and the CIA became an agency. CIA had both a clandestine black operations arm and an intelligence analysis arm.
The OPC was set up to organize propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, sabotage, demolition, subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.
What happened at the end of World War II when Truman disbanded the OSS? The covert operators were in the wilderness for a little while, and some of them had been leading Wall Street bankers and lawyers, and there’s a certain logic there because prior to the war, the people engaged in international trade and international law were a relatively small number of people, and they were the specialists in international affairs for the United States; so for example, the man who was later to become chief of covert operations, black operations, for the CIA was a man named Frank Wisner, quite a prominent Wall Street lawyer.