To aid in the selection of videos for your class and research needs, we've created a large number of filmographies on many subject areas.
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This is a selective list of video holdings in the American University Library. Filmographies are created by doing multiple keyword searches in the catalog to capture as many titles on a topic as possible.
For complete, up-to-date holdings please search the library catalog search box on the Media Services homepage. (http://www.american.edu/library/mediaservices/) Finding Aids on the same page includes other subject oriented content.
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If a tree falls: a story of the Earth Liberation Front. 2011, 1 streaming video file (85 min.). The remarkable story of the rise and fall of the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group that the FBI calls America's 'number one domestic terrorist threat,' told through the transformation and radicalization of one of its members, Daniel McGowan. Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Marshall Curry weaves a chronicle of McGowan facing life in prison with a dramatic investigation of the events that led to his involvement with the ELF. DVD 9427 Streaming video
Journey to the Safest Place on Earth
Charles McCombie has been leading the search for a safe nuclear waste disposal for 35 years. His quest takes him from the deserts of Nevada to the Swiss mountains, Australia, the Gobi desert & a small community in Sweden where people are voting about living on a nuclear disposal. Edgar Hagen examines the limitations and contradictions of this global quest.
Streaming video
Just Eat It
Filmakers and food lovers Jen and Grant dive into the issue of waste from farm, through retail, all the way to the back of their own fridge. After catching a glimpse of the billions of dollars of good food that is tossed each year in North America, they pledge to quit grocery shopping cold turkey and survive only on foods that would otherwise be thrown away.
Streaming video
Kilowatt ours energy conservation and renewables. 2004?, 1 videodisc (38 min.). "Kilowatt Ours reveals an optimistic message, introducing viewers to individuals, businesses and schools that have cut their energy use (and bills) in half. The benefits of energy conservation and renewable power to the consumer, the environment and the economy, empower viewers to become part of the clean energy revolution"--Container. DVD 6558
King corn a film. 2006, 1 videodisc (92 min.). "In King Corn, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, nitrogen fertilizers, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America's most productive, most subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat-- and how we farm."--container. DVD 4214
King corn. 2007, 1 streaming video file (90 min.). Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney are best friends and ecological activists who met at Yale and learned that their great-grandfathers were from the same small town, Greene, Iowa. Their existential shock at learning that their " ... generation was at risk of having a shorter life span than our parents, and it was because of what we ate" prompts a return to their ancestral home--a farming town of just over 1000 people--to spend a year planting and harvesting an acre of corn. In the course of playing their minuscule part in the burgeoning corn industry, they learn about government subsidies, ammonia fertilizer, massively increased yields, and how the system favors mass production over small family farms. There is also the ubiquity of corn in food, from corn-fed beef to high-fructose syrup that sweetens sodas and other products. The film is a helpful tutorial on American corn production past and present, and an eminently watchable inquiry into the politics of food and public health . Streaming video
Koyaanisqatsi Life out of balance. 2002, 1 videodisc (87 min.). Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi Indian word meaning variously: crazy life, life in turmoil, life disintegrating, life out of balance (the subtitle for this film), and a state of life that calls for another way of life. This film presents a concert of visual images set to the music of Philip Glass that progesses from purely natural environments to nature as affected by man, and finally to man's own manmade environment that is devoid of nature. HOME USE COLLECTION DVD 8631
Last call at the oasis. 2012, 1 videodisc (ca. 105 min.). Water. It's the earth's most valuable resource. Our cities are powered by it, countless industries depend on it, and all living things need it to survive. But it's very possible that in the near future, there won't be enough to sustain life on our planet. This film sheds light on the vital role water plays in our lives, exposes the defects in the current system, and shows communities already struggling with its ill effects. HOME USE COLLECTION 10773
Life running out of control. 2004, 1 videodisc (95 min.). Explores the possibility of a future in which physical strength and assertiveness are the topselling items on "baby menus" and other frightening implications of market-driven genetic engineering. Showing how the government-funded Human Genome Project has become highly lucrative for pharmaceutical companies, the film examines the cases of exploitative gene harvesting in Iceland and Peru. Interviews with prominent scientists and activists highlight the dangers of patenting genetic data and an absence of public discourse about artificial gene selection. DVD 1561
Manakamana
Produced by the directors of SWEET GRASS and LEVIATHAN, MANAKAMANA is an exhilarating, one-of-a-kind documentary experience. Filmed entirely inside the narrow confines of a cable car, high above a jungle in Nepal, that transports villagers to an ancient mountaintop temple, it is an acute ethnographic investigation into culture, religion, technology and modernity.
DVD 11607 and Streaming video
Merchants of Doubt
Follows several for-hire scientific experts that are regularly featured in the media speaking about threats to the public from various environmental and man-made events.
DVD 12425
Monumental David Brower's fight for wild America. 2004, 1 videodisc (74 min.). Tells the story of conservationist David Brower, first executive director of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth and the Earth Island Institute, who worked to save the natural environment and to protect and establish some of America's national parks. Includes 16-mm archival footage (much shot by Brower himself), photographic images from well-known artists, and interviews with leading conservationists, photographers, historians, curators, and politicians, as well as Brower's family, friends, and colleagues. DVD 980
Mr CO2. 2010, 1 streaming video file (52 min.). Summary: "This documentary may use whimsical animation to personify carbon dioxide emissions, but its message is dead-serious: if we fail to cut the rate of CO2 spewing into the atmosphere, we face a bleak future. MR. CO2 opens in Copenhagen, where the world's political leaders gather in December 2009 to try and hammer out a new carbon treaty to replace the Kyoto Accord. Joining them are activists and climate scientists, on-hand to press for action. They include Rajendra K. Pachauri, Chair of the International Panel on Climate Change, and Bill McKibben, founder of a movement aimed at lowering atmospheric carbon, who says at the conference, 'we are past the red line, the real debate is between human beings on the one hand, and physics and chemistry on the other.'" --Icarus website, viewed 28th October, 2011. DVD 9204 and Streaming video
My Name is Salt
Year after year, Sanabhai brings his family to a seasonal saline desert in Gujarat India, where they harvest what they proudly proclaim to be the world's whitest salt, using the same painstaking, manual techniques as generations before them. Hardship and exploitation loom large in this film, but director Farida Pacha lets this speak for itself, instead fixing her gaze on the poetry and ritual of Sanabhai and his family's existence. Exquisite camerawork and a haunting score help Pacha expose the austere beauty of the subject.
Streaming video
Natural connections. 2000, 1 streaming media file (46 min.). Uses interviews with scientists, photography, graphics, and original music to introduce the basic concepts of biodiversity, underline the importance of maintaining biodiversity, explore how nature and human nature are intertwined and how everyday decisions affect biodiversity. Takes a close-up look at salmon, rainforests, and marine ecosystems as examples. Streaming video
No impact man. 2010, 1 videodisc (93 min.). Colin Beavan is a New York City writer and self-proclaimed liberal. He has big plans for his new book. He decides on a grand experiment: to live one year with as little impact on the environment as possible. The problem is, the project requires his wife Michelle, an espresso-guzzling, Prada-worshipping business writer, and their young daughter to be fully on board. The family embarks on a year of no electricity, television, cars, toilet paper, elevators, or newspapers. DVD 6799
No Man's Land
NO MAN'S LAND gives a detailed, on-the-ground account of the 2016 standoff between armed militants (led by Cliven Bundy's sons Ammon and Ryan) occupying Oregon's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and federal authorities. What began as a protest to condemn the sentencing of two ranchers quickly morphed into a catchall for those eager to register their militant antipathy toward the federal government. During the 41-day siege, director David Byars was granted remarkable access to the inner workings of the insurrection as the protestors went about the daily business of engaging in an armed occupation.
DVD 16047 and Streaming video
Not Without Us
Demonstrating the power of the masses to challenge Big Oil interests, NOT WITHOUT US is an all too timely document of the grassroots struggle for significant climate action. Taking place in the months leading up to COP21 in Paris, the film chronicles activists from around the world and the different tactics they use to make their voices heard.
Starting nine months before the conference, the film takes us around the globe -- from North America to Europe to West Africa to South America -- as several activists fight for meaningful change. Indigenous activists in particular are highlighted as they outline how environmental rights are also human rights and that violations often hit them the hardest. Unfortunately, the presence of corporate sponsors who still have much to gain by maintaining the status quo indicates that the result of COP21 may be more empty promises and half measures than civilization saving actions.
Streaming video
Once Upon a Forest
Can Dapplewood Forest be saved? Meet Abigail, Edgar and Russell as they take off on an unforgettable journey of excitement and danger when they try to save Dapplewood and help their young friend Michelle who is in trouble in the forest. These woodland creatures are in a race against time and are forced to cope with a threat to their environment as the life of their young friend hangs in the balance.
Streaming video
Pandora's Promise
A feature-length documentary about the history and future of nuclear power. The film explores how and why mankind's most feared and controversial technological discovery is now passionately embraced by many of those who once led the charge against it. Operating as history, cultural meditation and contemporary exploration, PANDORA'S PROMISE aims to inspire a serious and realistic debate over what is without question the most important question of our time: how do we continue to power modern civilization without destroying it?
DVD 6421 and Streaming video
Peacock's war. 89, 1 streaming video file (60 min.). Douglas Peacock advocates for the survival of the grizzly bear and for the open spaces which allow them to live in the wilderness. Streaming video
Pilgrims and Tourists
In the Russian Republic of Altai, traditional native people create their own mountain parks, to rein in tourism and resist a gas pipeline that would cut through a World Heritage Site. In northern California, Winnemem Wintu girls grind herbs on a sacred medicine rock, as elders protest U.S. government plans to enlarge one of the West's biggest dams and forever submerge this touchstone of a tribe.
DVD 6428 and Streaming video
Planeat. 2011, 1 streaming video file (72 min.). "Where have we gone wrong? Why has the death rate from heart disease and cancer exploded in recent times? Why are the ice caps melting, the oceans dying and the forests being cut down as we produce the food necessary to support our burgeoning populations? Against a backdrop of colorful and delicious food grown by organic farmers and prepared in the kitchens of world-famous chefs, this video for the first time brings together the ground-breaking studies of three prominent scientists who have made it their life's work to answer these questions. Dr. T. Colin Campbell in China by exploring the link between diet and disease, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn's use of nutrition to treat chronically ill heart disease patients, and Professor Gidon Eshel's investigations into how our food choices contribute to global warming, wasteful land use and lifeless oceans."--Distributor's abstract. Streaming video
Planetary
PLANETARY is a provocative and breathtaking wakeup call -- a cross continental, cinematic journey. The film takes us from one of the truly extraordinary events of our civilization, space travel, and looks at how this gave us a totally different perspective on the Earth. It is a humbling reminder of the near-incalculable breadth of our impact on the earth, intellectually challenges us to reconsider our relationship with our home and the urgency to shift our perspective -- to remember that we are planetary.
Streaming video
Plastic Paradise
Thousands of miles away from civilization, Midway Atoll is in one of the most remote places on earth. And yet it's become ground zero for The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, syphoning plastics from three distant continents. In this independent documentary film, journalist/filmmaker Angela Sun travels on a personal journey of discovery to uncover this mysterious phenomenon. Along the way she meets scientists, researchers, influencers, and volunteers who shed light on the effects of our rabid plastic consumption and learns the problem is more insidious than we could have ever imagined.
Streaming video
Population Boom
A well-known nightmarish vision of the future: The Earth's population reaches seven billion. Dwindling resources, mountains of toxic waste, hunger and climate change-the results of overpopulation? Who says that the world's overpopulated? And who's one too many? After the box-office success of "Plastic Planet," in POPULATION BOOM curious documentary filmmaker Werner Boote travels the globe and examines a stubborn view of the world that has existed for decades. But he sees a completely different question: Who or what is driving this catastrophic vision?
DVD 12693 and Streaming video
Post-carbon futures. 2010, 1 streaming video file (53 min.). "'Post-carbon futures' makes the case that we need a completely different approach to economic growth and prosperity and that geo-engineering and building huge projects simply in order to maintain a consumer society makes no sense. British environmentalist Tim Jackson, from the University of Surrey, and French writer Paul Ariès both argue that our current economic system has trapped us into needing to constantly increase our emissions. Ariès, a leading advocate of the 'de-growth' movement passionately argues for a re-imagining of our economic system and not just cutting back on emissions but redefining prosperity itself. The film travels to the UK, where we visit the British 'transition town' of Totnes, which is converting itself into an environmentally sustainable community, and meet permaculture activists in San Francisco who dream of turning the city's 1,800 acres of lawns into sources of food, fuel and fibre. Maybe our best hope for bold changes lies right in our backyards."--Icarus website, viewed 17th Nov, 2011. Streaming video
Promised land. 1 videodisc (107 min.). Corporate salesman Steve Butler has been dispatched to the rural town of McKinley with his sales partner to offer much-needed relief to the economically hard-hit residents in exchange for drilling rights to their properties. As they grapple with a surprising array of both open hearts and closed doors, the outsiders soon discover the strength of an American small town at a crossroads.
HOME USE COLLECTION DVD 6374
Queen of the sun what are the bees telling us? 2011, 1 streaming video file (82 min.). A documentary on colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon involving the mass disappearance of honeybees from their hives. HOME USE COLLECTION DVD 11175 and Streaming video
Rachel Carson's Silent spring. 2007, 1 videodisc (56 min.). Witness the life of passionate biologist and environmentalist, Rachel Carson, and how she exposed the effects of the unregulated use of pesticides and herbicides by the federal government, and sparked a revolution in environmental policy. DVD 5877
Racing Extinction
Academy Award-winning filmmakers expose the forces that are leading our planet to its next mass extinction, potentially resulting in the loss of half of all species. A never-before-seen view of an international wildlife trade, operating in the shadows, reveals how creatures that have survived for millions of years may be wiped from Earth in our lifetime.
DVD 13644
Raising Shrimp
From the same team that brought you Fishmeat: Choose Your Farm Wisely comes an in-depth look at America’s most popular and iconic seafood—shrimp, 90% of which are imported. This exciting eye-opener encourages “the American public to wake from its sleepwalk through the supermarket isles” (Paul Greenberg, Author “Four Fish”) and reveals new ways of raising shrimp that offer hope for all. Raising Shrimp uncovers the economic and medical perils of an outsourced food supply, and follows Ted, an engineer, and Andy, an ecologist, on a quest for a better shrimp. Ted and Andy help us look at shrimp with a new excitement, revealing why this little critter is more than just a tasty dining choice, and could be a hint of salvation for our entire food culture.
Streaming video
Revenge of the electric car. 2011, 1 streaming video file (90 min.). By 2006, as many as 5,000 electric cars were destroyed by the major car companies that built them. Today, the electric car is back with a vengeance. Without using a single drop of foreign oil, this new generation of car is America's future: fast, furious, and cleaner than ever. It's not just the next generation of green cars that's on the line, it's the future of the automobile itself.
Streaming video and HOME USE COLLECTION DVD 9712
Sand Wars
Sand Wars is a surprising investigation into one of the most consumed natural resources on the planet. Due to the high demand for sand, the planet's reserves are being threatened. Three-quarters of the world's beaches are in decline and bound to disappear as victims of erosion and sand smuggling. Triggered by building construction, smuggling bands, or “sand mafias,” plunder beaches and rivers for this highly prized commodity. This film will take us around the world to witness this new gold rush firsthand.
Streaming video
Seed: The Untold Story
SEED: THE UNTOLD STORY follows passionate seed-keepers protecting our 12,000 year-old food legacy. These farmers, scientists, lawyers and indigenous people are fighting a David and Goliath battle to defend the future of our food. In a harrowing and heartening story, these heroes rekindle a lost connection to our most treasured resource and revive a culture connected to seeds.
Streaming video
Seeds of hunger. 2008, 1 streaming video file (53 min.). "With the world of agriculture confronting the impact of such factors as global warming, population urbanization trends, changes in eating habits, and increased use of grain for biofuels, [this film] outlines the shape of an impending global food crisis. Filmed in Africa, China, Latin America, and the U.S., [the film] examines issues involved in creating such a crisis, including the politics of food security and scarcity, declining food production, and the need for increased production to meet population growth, the impact of genetically modified foods, water shortages, famine, food aid programs, the loss of crop land, and national food production, distribution and export policies."--Distrbutor's abstract. Streaming video and DVD 10047
Seeds of Time
The clock is ticking on one of the greatest potential disasters in the history of our species and one man leads a worldwide crusade to avert it. Crop diversity pioneer Cary Fowler travels the world, educating the public about the dire consequences of our inaction. The world's agriculture - and it's fate - are dependent on the ability of plants to adapt to changes in climate, pests and disease - but today's crops around the globe are grown from human-engineered seeds and have lost nearly all their diversity and ability to naturally adapt.
Could one massive infestation of fungus, blight or insects cause all the world's corn, wheat or lettuce to die? Is modern agriculture setting the stage for economic disaster, food riots, and global starvation? Dr. Fowler is the head of an international consortium to store seeds from every agricultural plant in the world. But is his farsighted program enough to save humanity from annihilation?
DVD 12993 and Streaming video
Shattered sky the battle for energy, economy, and enviornment. 2012, 1 streaming video file (60 min.). Eerily reminiscent of today's energy and climate crisis, 'Shattered Sky' recounts the dramatic story of how America led the world to solve the biggest environmental crisis ever seen. Thirty years ago, scientists reported a hole in the ozone layer 'the size of North America.' The culprit was CFCs, prevalent in billions of dollars worth of refrigeration, air conditioning and other products that had revolutionized the American way of life. Doctors forecast skyrocketing rates of cancer. The stakes were 'life as we know it.' But business remained bitterly opposed and politicians were initially slow to act. For the first time in film, 'Shattered Sky' goes inside the ozone crisis to explore how America led the world to a solution. It insprires viewrs toward the same can-do spirit on climate change today.
Streaming video
SOLA. 2010, 1 videodisc (62 min.). Investigates how the exploitation of Southern Louisiana's abundant natural resources compromised the resiliency of its ecology and culture, multiplying the devastating impact of the BP oil spill and Hurricane Katrina. DVD 8124 Streaming video
Something Better to Come
Something Better To Come is an extraordinary, thirteen-year personal journey set in one of the bleakest urban places in the world: a large “svalka” (garbage dump) just 13 miles away from Red Square, Moscow. People struggle to live there, including eleven-year-old Yula, our protagonist. We follow Yula until she is twenty-five. In spite of the terrible conditions there, people still laugh, love, support and help each other in the face of horrible adversity. Finally one day she breaks out and leaves the garbage dump in search of a new life, a normal life.
Streaming video
Sonic Sea
Sonic Sea is a powerful, visually stunning documentary about the impact of industrial and military ocean noise on whales and other marine life. It tells the story of a former US Navy officer who solved a tragic mystery and changed forever the way we understand our impact on the ocean. The film is narrated by Rachel McAdams and features Sting, in addition to the renowned ocean experts Dr. Sylvia Earle, Dr. Paul Spong, Dr. Christopher Clark and Jean-Michel Cousteau.
Streaming video
Split estate. 2009, 1 streaming video file (76 min.). Imagine discovering that you don't own the mineral rights under your land, and that an energy company plans to drill for natural gas two hundred feet from your front door. Imagine finding that you have little or no recourse to protect your home or land from such development. [The film] maps a tragedy in the making, as citizens in the path of a new drilling boom in the Rocky Mountain West struggle against the erosion of their civil liberties, their communities and their health. Streaming video DVD 10444
Standing on Sacred Ground: Profit and Loss
From New Guinean rainforests to Canada's tar sands, PROFIT AND LOSS exposes industrial threats to native peoples' health, livelihood and cultural survival. In Papua New Guinea, a Chinese-government owned nickel mine has violently relocated villagers to a taboo sacred mountain, built a new pipeline and refinery on contested clan land, and is dumping mining waste into the sea. In Alberta, First Nations people suffer from rare cancers as their traditional hunting grounds are stripmined to unearth the world's third-largest oil reserve. Indigenous people tell their own stories-and confront us with the ethical consequences of our culture of consumption.
DVD-6428 and Streaming video