Director: Dylan Mohan Gray
Run Time: 86 min.
Call Number: RC607.A26 F5455 2013
"This infuriating documentary by Dylan Mohan Gray chronicles the long
battle to make generic ARVs available to poor African countries, which
big pharma resisted because cheap drugs would undermine their bloated
pricing here in the U.S. Of course the federal government supported this
unconscionable arrangement—though, as the documentary points out,
Washington was more than willing to suspend patents on drugs needed
during the post-9/11 anthrax scares. The Clinton Foundation gets a few
points for its scheme of pooling poor nations' resources to bargain with
the pharmas, but the genuine hero here is Peter Mugyenyi, a Ugandan
physician who managed to break the industry's blockade against generic
drugs from India."
—J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader
Director: Markus Imhoof
Run Time: 91 min.
Call Number: SF538.5.C65 M67 2012
"In recent years, bee-farming statistics have been frightening. For some
yet undetermined reason bee-farming has been diminishing around the
world as bees have been dying dreadfully, and now an Austrian
film-maker, Markus Imhoof, also a bee-farmer, has made this picture—not
as an attack on the danger but as a general illuminator. Bee farming has
been around for 15,000 years, and a lot of notable minds—Einstein among
them—have said that if bees were to disappear, human beings would
disappear within four years. Imhoof makes bees more important than they
have previously seemed."
Director: Robert Greenwald
Run Time: 66 min.
Call Number: JF1525.W45 W37 2013
"You don't have to be a rightwing wacko or naive lefty to be chilled by some policies and practices of the Obama administration. Nothing illustrates that better than the administration's treatment of whistleblowers who take on the federal government. Robert Greenwald's latest documentary focuses on the brutal fallout faced by four people—Michael DeKort, Thomas Drake, Franz Gayl, and Thomas Tamm—who exposed corruption in branches of the government or corporations working with the government. . . . Fast-moving and sleekly crafted, the film packages its dire warnings
about the ways truth-speakers are penalized, and what that portends for
the country, in a way that is accessible without sacrificing nuance or
intelligence."
—Ernest Hardy, Village Voice
