Films with: Munro, David

Death of a nation the Timor conspiracy : a special report /

On December 7, 1975 Indonesia secretly -- but with the complicity of the Western powers including the US, the UK, and Australia -- invaded the small nation of East Timor. Two Australian television crews attempting to document the invasion were murdered. In 1993, with the Indonesian army still occupying the country, John Pilger and his crew including director David Munro, slipped into East Timor and made this film. In the intervening 18 years, an estimated 200,000 East Timorese -- 1/3 of the population -- had been slaughtered by the Indonesian military. The CIA has described it as one of the worst mass-murders of the 20th century. Pilger tells the story using clandestine footage of the countryside, internment camps and even Fretlin guerrillas, as well as interviews with Timorese exiles, including Jose Ramos Horta and Jose Gusmao, and Australian, British, and Indonesian diplomats. Nixon had called Indonesia the "greatest prize in southeast Asia" because of its oil reserves and other natural resources. Even though Indonesia had no historic or legal claim to East Timor, it was convenient for diplomats to declare that East Timor, just gaining its independence from Portugal, would not be a viable state. However the lie was given to this argument when Australia and Indonesia signed the Timor Gap Oil Treaty and carved up the huge oil and gas reserves in the seabed off East Timor. None of the politicians from that period -- President Ford, Henry Kissinger, Daniel Moynihan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Gough Whitlam -- has clean hands. The Indonesian military used US and British planes to bombard the island, while the defense ministers proclaimed ignorance. As Pilger gets an Australian diplomat to admit, East Timor was considered "expendable." But no one watching the massacre in the Dili cemetery can excuse the geopolitical machinations that led to this genocide.

DVD 4875

Do you remember Vietnam? a report /

In 1978, three years after the fall of Saigon, John Pilger went back to Vietnam to find out what had happened under the new regime. He talks with a young tour guide at a war crimes museum, who had been imprisoned in the infamous US tiger cages. He follows a former North Vietnamese soldier into the underground base where he spent 20 years crawling through tunnels undetected. He visits the street in Hanoi that was the target of the largest single aerial bombardment in history. And he shows us the re-education camps where former drug addicts, prostitutes, South Vietnam soldiers, and others are being taught what to think. An he reminds us of the long history of Vietnam's wars for independence. 44% of Vietnam's forests have been decimated, poisonous chemicals have produced babies with deformations, 58,000 Americans and 2-5 million Vietnamese lost their lives. And all of this suffering was for what? "To stop the spread of Chinese communism" was the rationale. And yet, Pilger argues, if we had let them form their own independent state in the late 1940s, what probably would have emerged is what is emerging now -- a kind of Asian Yugoslavia.

DVD 4873

Year zero the silent death of Cambodia : a report /

As the first complete report of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge and the devastating affects of US bombing in Cambodia during the Vietnam War, Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia is an important and historic document of the grim reign of Pol Pot and the world's response of indifference and inaction. Year Zero was 1975, the end of the secret US bombing campaign against the Viet Cong that saw 100,000 tons of bombs dropped over Cambodia, and the emergence of the Khmer Rouge party as a ruling force. That year saw the desertion of the capital of Phnom Penh and the displacement of some 2.5 million people, the majority of whom would soon go missing. Pilger explores the roots of the US bombing campaign that began in 1969, contrasting ti sharply with powerful footage of sick and starving Cambodians and interviews with relief workers with UNICEF and the Red Cross as well as imprisoned members of Pol Pot's regime. At the time of its first broadcast in 1979, Year Zero was for many the first glimpse of a harrowing injustice that had been played out with little fanfare. John Pilger lays bare the entire chain of events, from the removal of King Norodom Sihanouk to ensuing famine and genocide under the Khmer Rouge. The film is both disturbing and poignant, a sobering portrait of Cambodia's recent history.

DVD 4874