Freedom Riders (2011)

Director: Stanley Nelson
Run Time: 120 min.
Call Number:  E185.61 .F74 2011

"The filmmaker Stanley Nelson has a stunning accomplishment in 'Freedom Riders,' a documentary that chronicles a crucial, devastating episode of the civil rights movement, an episode whose gruesome visuals impinged on the perception of American liberty around the world. Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the freedom rides, the film . . . is a story of ennobled youth and noxious hatred, of decided courage and inexplicable brutality. In May 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality sought to challenge the segregation of interstate travel on public transport and sent forth activists, both black and white, and many of them students, on a bus journey through the South, where they were received with violence that law enforcers refused to tame. . . . It is hard to imagine a feature film conveying the events with a more vivid sense of drama or suspense."
—Ginia Bellafante, New York Times

Nothing Like Chocolate (2013)

Director: Kum-Kum Bhavnani
Run Time: 68 min.
Call Number:  HD9200.G76 N68 2013

"Smartly directed by UCSB Sociology professor Kum-Kum Bhavnani, the film fleshes out the opening line supplied by one Susan Sarandon: 'Who doesn’t love chocolate? But there’s more to this decadent product than we know.' Actually, news has been spreading, if not fast or wide enough, about the inhumane child slave labor deployed in key West African cocoa-growing regions, especially the Ivory Coast. . . . But [Bhavnani] has wisely chosen to personalize her tale and give it a face by focusing on one particular 'ethical chocolate' company, the Grenada Chocolate Factory, run by the charismatic NYC émigré Mott Green, a self-described 'political activist version of Willie Wonka.'”
—Joseph Woodard, Santa Barbara Independent

Spies of Mississippi (2014)

Director: Dawn Porter
Run Time: 60 min. 
Call Number: E185.93.M6 S65 2014

"Founded in the 1950s as Supreme Court rulings began to chip away at Jim Crow, the Sovereignty Commission was an instrument of domestic intelligence-gathering whose stated mission was to preserve segregation. From a few operatives working under the governor, it grew into 'the Stasi of Mississippi,' generating upward of 160,000 pages of reports. It gave information to the police, many of whose officers belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. If the commission might have considered its activities technically, if whimsically, 'legal,' the Klan did not bother with such fine points; its tactics included bombings, kidnappings and murder, among other more run-of-the-mill forms of terrorism."
—Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times

Portrait of Wally (2012)

Director: Andrew Shea
Run Time: 90 min.
Call Number: N8795.3.A8 P67 2012

"As detailed in Andrew Shea's fascinating documentary 'Portrait of Wally,' Egon Schiele's haunting 1912 painting of his mistress and favorite model Wally Neuzil had a complicated, extremely dramatic history as well as a legal and cultural significance that can't be overestimated. The battle to return this heartfelt painting . . . to the family of the woman who originally owned it jump-started the current international art restitution movement that reunites misappropriated objects with their original owners. . . . On one level, the story of this painting should have been the simple one of a great work of art returned to its rightful owners. By showing how difficult and problematic righting a wrong can turn out to be, 'Portrait of Wally' does itself proud."
 —Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

Dirty Wars (2013)

Director: Richard Rowley
Time: 86 min.
Call Number: UB251.U5 D57 2013

"The subject and narrator of this documentary, Jeremy Scahill, is a journalist who’s always on the lookout for unreported or underreported stories. . . . While in Kabul, Afghanistan, investigating the war on terror, the growing number of mysterious night raids on civilian targets started to pique his interest. The nightly raids listed in the NATO press releases seemed to him like 'a map of a hidden war.' . . . As Scahill pulled at this thread and followed other leads, he discovered the supersecret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a unit formed in 1980 to conduct airstrikes and targeted killing anywhere in the world at the command of the United States president."

—Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle