“Taxi to the Dark Side“ won the Oscar for Best Documentary last weekend, and is a brutal and methodical investigation of torture and interrogation policies in America’s “war on terror.” Over 100 prisoners have died in US custody, with the military itself reporting 37 of those deaths as homicides. Additionally, only seven percent of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have been apprehended by US military personnel. The rest have been turned in by bounty hunters, warlords, and others with agendas completely unrelated to the US war on terror.

Filmmaker Alex Gibney parallels a disturbing investigation into the abuses at Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo with an in-depth look at the apprehension and eventual murder of an innocent taxi driver, Dilawar, who was accused of a crime by the very man who committed it. The film contains uncensored footage of the Bagram base and shows interviews with interrogators, guards, and other military personnel, while examining the roles of key figures in the Bush administration in refuting the Geneva Conventions and the embracing of torture as the weapon of choice in the war against terrorism.

Read the rest of this entry »

The TakePart Top 10 Weekly Roundup is a compilation of the week’s most notable stories from our entertainment-meets-social-action blogging network. Several topics really stood out this week, including the Oscars as social advocacy inspiration, civil rights and Black History Month, and lots of hot news on entertainment going Green. Check out our most popular posts of the week on these subjects, as well as a few TakePart blogger favorites.

Katie:

Happy Belated “Freedom to Marry” Week!

Rosa and Raymond Parks: Valiant Valentine #5

* * *
Nicole:

Top 10 Oscar Picks to Inspire Social Action

Cornel West: Black Thoughts On Black History Month

* * *
Giulia:

H&M’s “Fashion Against AIDS”

Ed Begley Jr. Goes Green

* * *
Gina:

Top 10 Best Picture Winners That Inspire

Remixing “Chicago 10″

* * *
Kerry:

How To Set the World On Fire Without Burning Out

Eco-Brokers Cater to Green Homebuyers

In honor of the Oscars and documentary, I’ve been looking at all of the nominees for Best Documentary. With the awards on Sunday, it’s time to focus on the last nominee, Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight. An investigation into America’s invasion of Iraq, the film goes in depth to figure out who was behind the invasion and what they were thinking. Ferguson puts his doctorate in political science to good use and creates one of the more succinct arguments against the US presence in Iraq.

The film is said to be more narrow in focus than other documentaries that focus on Iraq, but I tend to agree with A.O Scott’s review in The New York Times, when he says that:

It might be argued that since Mr. Bremer ( L. Paul Bremer III), Mr. Rumsfeld (Donald Rumsfeld) and Mr. Wolfowitz (Paul Wolfowitz) declined to appear in the film, Mr. Ferguson was able to present only one side of the story. But the accumulated professional standing of the people he did interview, and their calm, detailed insistence on the facts, makes such an objection implausible.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 80th Annual Academy Awards are almost upon us, and I’m sure you all have your favorite films that you’re routing for. We here at TakePart have our fave films too, of course based on their relevance to social action and advocacy. Check out our picks for these top 10 Oscar categories, and how these films have left the world a bit of a better place than before they arrived on the big (or little) screen!

* * *

Actor in a Leading Role: Tommy Lee Jones in In the Valley of Elah

Tommy Lee Jones gives an incredible performance as a war veteran searching for his son, a soldier who recently returned from Iraq, but has now mysteriously disappeared. The shadow of the Iraq war is cast across several films that have been nominated this year, but Jones’ moving performance highlights the emotional and spiritual battles soldiers and their families must face long after they’ve come home from the combat zone.

and find out what you can do to help Veterans for Peace seek justice for veterans and victims of war, and to abolish war as an instrument of national policy.

* * *

Read the rest of this entry »

The Oscars are a hop, skip and a jump away (a week and a half!) so I thought it might be nice to look at the 4th nominee for Best Documentary, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience (directed by Richard Robbins). The movie takes firsthand accounts from soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and their families and turns them into a movie. Their experiences are told to us in interviews and dramatic readings that are accompanied by real footage, photos and animations, to paint a portrait of what it is really like to be in the war.

Read the rest of this entry »

The third Oscar nominee for Best Documentary that I am going to look at leading up to the Academy Awards is War/Dance. The film follows a group of schoolchildren from a refugee camp in northern Uganda to a national music competition. The children are victims of a 20-year civil war that has cost tens of thousands of lives in northern Uganda.

Many were abducted from their villages in the middle of the night by the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group that turned kidnapped boys as young as 5 into soldiers and girls into sexual slaves.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I looked at one of the Oscar nominees for Best Documentary, a category that features amazing films, but gets little publicity. Leading up to the Oscars, I am going to explore all 5 of the films that are nominated.

The doc I chose today comes as a result of my watching the State of the Union last night and because after Thursday I will personally no longer have health insurance. The annual speech designed to explore how our country is doing got me to thinking that the state of my personal union isn’t very different than the country.  The majority of my friends don’t have any health insurance and despite making good wages, with the amount of rent they have to pay just to live in New York City, they can’t afford to shell out 300+ dollars to have insurance (when I quit my full-time job, I asked how much it would be to get Cobra - the answer was an astounding 490 dollars a month).

Michael Moore’s Sicko aims to find out why my friends and I and millions of Americans don’t have health insurance. Considering where we live and the resources our country has it seems strange that our health system would be ranked 37th in the world:

Read the rest of this entry »