lest I forget

Nothing fancy here, just a list of some of the best documentaries I;ve seen lately. Realised that keeping track of all this is very useful esp. when I am likely to be asked soon to teach a class full of American undergrads with an attention span of a ____ I don't know whichever animal has the shortest attention span!

1. Lest we Forget: On hate crimes and racila profiling of South Asian (especially Indians) and Arabs post 9/11. really hard-hitting, yes partly becasue I had no idea how pathetic the situation is here with govt. agents harrassing people from India, Middle East - basically any one irrespective of religion or nationalty as long as they were of unfamiliar color and had strange sounding names.

The most bizarre was the burning of a Hindu temple in NJ (the mob thought its a mosque) and what affected me most was the Indo-Canadian (very like us kind of woman) who was harrased to death by the custms authority cos they suspected she was a terrorist (her name incidentally was Helen Cruz or somethinge xtremely not muslim)

2. Enron - The smartest guys in the room: saw this yesterday. Brillinatly researched with the right amount of drama and information and traced out the rise and fall of Enron, their wierd innovations and ventures, their blatant lack of respect for shareholders and ordinary people, the way the CEO bailed out from the "sinking ship", the story of the whistle blower, connections with most major banks, Arthur Anderson...


3. Life and Debt is an unnerving film. It makes you feel guilty for doing something that you thought was innocuous - being a tourist. The movie traces the life of ordinary Jamaicans trying to negotiate the chanegs brought baout by structural adjustment programs. The voices of people of Jamaica, Jamaica's former Prime Minister Michael Manely and former IMF Deputy Director Stanley Fischer relate the human suffering which follows globalization in this country. What makes it especially poignant is the Juxtaposition of these voices with images of fat white tourists guzzling beer, and doing all the things we dream of doing in the Carribeans.

4. Senorita Extraviada : This movie was not just unnerving it was sinister and scary. It left most of us trembling and no this was not an unecessarily dramatic documentary. The documenatry describes the alarming situation in Juarez - a border town of Mexico, which is now being called the "capital of murdered women". More than 300 women have gone missing or have been found dead in the past 10 years and this movie unravels the politics behind this. From the role of maquiladoras, to drug traficking, prostitution, serial killers, jealous lovers and police involvement- almost all theories are explored. The killings continue..