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

Fire in the Blood (2013)

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

More Than Honey (2013)

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."

War on Whistleblowers (2013)

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