Movies: John Pilger

Documentary about innocent people confined to prison on remand. John Pilger reports that more than half of the 500,000 people remanded in custody by magistrates each year are eventually found not guilty, fined or, as in the case of “Helen”, given a ...

Alabama governor George Wallace made his name as a segregationist remembered for standing “in the schoolhouse door” of the University of Alabama in 1963 in an attempt to stop the enrolment of black students. John Pilger subsequently interviewed Walla...

How can a country survive when its jungle borders hold 4000 hostile troops?...

Burp! Pepsi Vs Coke in the Ice Cold War traces the history of these brands against the backdrop of global politics. The second world war was the perfect vehicle for Coca-Cola distribution (including to the Nazis), with bottling plants on front lines ...

In the 1960s, as West Indians, Pakistanis, Indians and Africans began to arrive in Britain from former British colonies, race became a political issue. In the 1964 General Election, a swing to the Conservative Party in Labour’s Smethwick constituency...

1981. The shabby treatment of returning combat soldiers from Vietnam is investigated....

1983. The worldwide propaganda surrounding the nuclear arms race is scrutinised....

In 1974, when famine hit the country, Pilger returned to Bangladesh to make An Unfashionable Tragedy. It contains harrowing scenes of starving children but also puts the horrors into a geopolitical context. This is Pilger’s first documentary to highl...

The second of John Pilger’s three 1976 documentaries made in the United States. In Pyramid Lake Is Dying, he reports on the demise in the culture of native Americans and the stealing of their resources. Pyramid Lake, in Nevada, home to the Paiute peo...

In the first of a trilogy of documentaries made in the United States, John Pilger reveals American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s policy of refusing aid to countries that do not support his government in the United Nations and the existence of ...

1980. A report on political repression in Mexico....

A Labour government imposing cutbacks on the National Health Services is the theme of Dismantling a Dream. Pilger recalls the establishment of the NHS in 1948 and Health Minister Aneurin Bevan’s declaration that the “silent suffering” of the old, you...

The potential dangers of nuclear weapons and the planned new breed of plutonium-fuelled reactors are the subject of An Unjustifiable Risk, made in 1977. John Pilger begins by explaining that just a speck of plutonium, the main component of an atomic ...

Shortly after his 1977 Daily Mirror reports on dissidents in the Soviet Union, John Pilger entered Czechoslovakia undercover to film A Faraway Country… a people of whom we know nothing, a title taking the words that British Prime Minister Neville Cha...

Children growing up in poverty is the subject of Smashing Kids, 1975. John Pilger meets the Hopwoods, of Liverpool, where hunger has become a way of life during father Harry’s unemployment as his family of five survive on £1 a day. The wallpaper in t...

This film expresses John Pilger’s belief that working people are seldom allowed a place in an essentially bourgeois media on their own political terms. In 1971, John Pilger travelled to the West Yorkshire industrial town of Keighley. This documentary...

Documentary from 1975 on the plight of mentally handicapped children held in appalling circumstances in the UK....

1989. An examination of how the UN protected and revitalised the Khmer Rouge....

A look at Japanese society and its emergent nationalism....

1990. The plight of a people who have struggled to rebuild their stricken country....