This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Craig Atkinson via Skype.

Do Not Resist is an urgent and powerful exploration of the rapid militarisation of the police in the United States. Opening on startling on-the-scene footage in Ferguson, Missouri, the film then broadens its scope to present scenes from across the country — a conference presentation where the value of high-end weapons technologies is presented to potential police buyers; a community that has just received its very own military-grade tank; and a SWAT team arriving at a home to execute a warrant. The cumulative effect of these vignettes paints a startling picture of the direction in which American law enforcement is headed.

Craig Atkinson filmed his directorial debut over two years and in 11 states. Through keen and thoughtful observances, Atkinson deftly presents the characters and stories that comprise this pressing issue. The result reveals a rare and surprising look into the increasingly disturbing realities of American police culture.

Directed by: Craig Atkinson
Country: United States
Year: 2016
Runtime: 73′

This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Dawn Porter via Skype.

At this very moment, a woman’s reproductive rights in the United States are not clear. Since 2010, state legislatures have passed more than 288 laws restricting abortion clinics and their doctors. From mandating the width of hallways to requiring physicians to have active admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, these measures are forcing clinics across the country to shut down in epidemic numbers.

Lawyer-turned-acclaimed-filmmaker Dawn Porter picks up the plight of the doctors and clinic operators along with the countless women relying on these facilities to uphold their legal right to safe abortion. As a landmark case against these laws brought by Texas clinics to the Supreme Court nears a verdict, the stakes on either side of the intractable divide have never been higher.

Winner of Sundance’s Special Jury Prize for Social Impact, this highly prescient study exposes the human cost of the war over choice.

Directed by: Dawn Porter
Country: United States
Year: 2016
Runtime: 80′
www.trappeddocumentary.com

Inspired by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s best-selling book The Spirit Level, Katharine Round’s accomplished debut feature illustrates a more personal account of how inequality shapes our societies.

The film weaves together seven characters each striving for a better life: Wall Street psychologist Alden wants to make it to the top 1%; Glaswegian rapper Darren just wants to stay sober; Newcastle carer Rochelle wishes her job wasn’t looked down on so much; Jen in Sacramento, California, doesn’t even talk to the neighbours in her upscale gated community – they’ve made it clear to her she isn’t “their kind”. It becomes clear that a higher income doesn’t ensure happiness and inequality hurts us all – rich and poor.

The film travels across the world and into individual lives to see how broad economic shifts have shaped not only our physical circumstances, but also the way we think and what we believe in. It reveals, piece by piece, the forces that have undermined our economic foundations, and led to a dramatic transfer of wealth to the very top: the top 0.1% in the US own as much wealth as the bottom 90% of the population.

The film features high profile commentators, including former economic adviser to Margaret Thatcher, Sir Alan Budd, historian Sir Max Hastings, economist Ha-Joon Chang, Noam Chomsky and epidemiologist Sir Michael Marmot. The Divide plots parallel character narratives together with an archive spine, juxtaposing news reports from 1979 to the present day, with the outcomes of those economic decisions and the thinking that made them possible. The lines are clearly drawn between the big picture and the very personal, producing a new and more human way of depicting the true toll of rising inequality.

Directed and produced by: Katharine Round
Executive producer: Christopher Hird
Runtime: 74′
Country: United Kingdom/Lebanon/Switzerland

“It’s a town hall style meeting – we quickly come to you,” BBC 4‘s Paddy O’Connell told a sold-out First Wednesday audience at the Frontline Club yesterday evening.  The topic was intervention in Syria, and with four experts by his side, O’Connell led a lively back-and-forth with the night’s attendees.

“Here we are talking about your country and bombing it, which we do regularly in the Middle East, don’t we?” he jibed to Lina Sinjab, who was born in Syria and worked as the BBC’s correspondent there until a few months ago.

L-R: Paddy O’Connell, Scott Lucas, Lina Sinjab, Shiraz Maher, Jonathan Steele. Photo: Jim Treadway

Sinjab, however, emphasised the necessity of stepping in.  With conservative estimates that 80,000 people have been killed and two million have fled the country, she opined:

“The reality on the ground is pushing Syrians – they have no other options. They know the Americans are coming for their own interest, but there is no other way to stop the bleeding of Syrians on a daily basis.”

Only one of the four experts argued against intervention:  Jonathan Steele, a columnist at The Guardian and longtime foreign correspondent.

“It would be a disaster,” Steele said.  “We don’t know what the repercussions would be… In Iraq and Afghanistan, we were told it’d be short and quick and surgical and all the rest of it, and they turn out not to be.”

But Syrians today are in a different position than Iraqis or Afghans a decade ago, Steele’s co-panelists felt.  Shiraz Maher is an expert on terrorism and Islamic groups in the Middle East, and to him, a critical factor is how much Syrians want an intervention:

“The Syrian people themselves have been calling for some form of intervention, for some form of outside help to come into Syria and tip the balance, and just to level that playing field…

” I’m not saying it would be clean [or] perfect. . . . Yes, if the West intervenes, we will inevitably kill, indirectly, and unintentionally, some civilians. But if we stand back, [Assad’s] regime continues to do the same thing – every single day.”

What should an intervention look like, then?

Sinjab, Maher, and Scott Lucas all withered at the idea of limited bombing.  Lucas, a professor at Birmingham University and expert on U.S. and U.K. involvement in the Middle East, explained:

“The question [shouldn’t] be on bombing. It should be on a longer term question of support for the insurgency. . . . It is a myth that Al Qaeda groups are dominating the insurgency. It’s a question of arms supplies: do you provide anti-aircraft and anti-tank weaponry to the insurgents which negates the weapons that Assad continues to have to basically maintain dominance? Do you support a no-fly zone or a protected zone that took place in Libya in 2011, which allowed people to be protected, and the opposition therefore could move against Qaddafi?”

The greatest danger to Syrians, Sinjab, Maher, and Lucas feared, was an intervention too weak or misguided.

“For Assad, for the Syrian Ba’athists,” Maher said, “this struggle is an existential one…  They [will] kill whatever number it takes [to survive].”

To protect Syrians, they saw a need for much more than just “a shot across the bow,” as U.S. President Obama has imagined.  In Sinjab’s words, Syrians

“are very fearful of:  if the Americans only did a ‘shot across the bow,’ and it was [only] a limited target, then the Assad forceswould retaliate big time on the people.”

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/first-wednesday-syria-crossing

"It appears that this individual was radicalized in his hometown in Minnesota," [FBI Director Robert] Mueller said. Federal authorities have said that [Shirwa] Ahmed was one of as many as two-dozen young men of Somali descent who disappeared in the past two years from their homes in the Minneapolis area after being recruited by the Shabab, a militia suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda that has waged a war against the Somali government.