How will showing a documentary on my campus Bring the World Home?
Showing a documentary on your campus is a great, non-labor intensive way of bring the world home. AID has a large variety of documentaries which we lend out for free. We think that this is a fantastic way to engage members of your community in important global issues.  You can show the film and then lead a discussion afterwards on a college campus, in a community institution such as a public library or church, or event at your apartment! 

We encourage you to screen a documentary as the launching point for a campus campaign or establishment of a campus chapter. Take the momentum gained from your film screening and use it to draw even more attention to urgent issues!

AID is currently offering movie kits, which include the DVD and discussion guide, a comprehensive organizing toolkit to secure a venue and attract large audiences, and $35 mini-grants to reimburse for copying flyers and buying light refreshments. AID is only sending out copies of the film that we have received from production companies with the express purpose of having public educational screenings.  You must not charge admission or issue tickets for your events. 

Please click here to sign-up in order receive one of the following films. We will then email you with all the materials you will need to publicize your event! To access comprehensive organizing toolkits with pre-tailored templates to help you reserve room, recruit co-sponsors, invite professors and students, contact the press, and so much more, click on the topic area that most closely matches the theme of your selected documentary: development, environment, health, or peace and security. AID staff are happy to support you - just call 410-962-8770!

Which documentaries can I show?

Addicted to Oil Examines a wide variety of developments taking place across the energy spectrum, from hybrid car enthusiasts who are converting their autos into "plug-ins" and getting 300 miles to a gallon of gas, to the current state of the hydrogen fuel cell. Other areas explored include "flex-fuel" vehicles that can run on an assortment of biofuels such as ethanol, which emits virtually no greenhouse gases and can be made from almost any biomass — like sugar cane, corn and even certain types of grass. (For example, in Brazil, 40 percent of all fuel used by drivers is ethanol.) Solar and especially wind power have made great advances in practical technologies that are increasingly being used throughout the world. Global warming is no longer a matter of debate, but a proven problem of potentially catastrophic proportions. As Friedman discovers in the course of our program, there is much we could do immediately, with technology at hand, to break our addiction to oil — and developing technologies promise a future free of a sole dependence on fossil fuels, a truly post-oil era. It can be done, if we have the will and leadership to do it. 60 minutes.

Between Two Fires documents the results of two decades of armed conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Ugandan government in the Northern Uganda, which has caused some nearly two million civilians to be displaced from their homes. While the LRA have been perpetrators of these crimes, the Ugandan People’s Defence Forces (UPDF), the national army, has also committed human rights violations against civilians that include extrajudicial killing and torture. Through the personal stories of torture survivors, Between Two Fires advocates for official acknowledgement of these abuses, redress for torture victims, as well as implementation of legislative measures to strengthen national mechanisms against the use of torture. 14 minutes.

Black Gold explains how international commodities markets are rigged against the nations of the global South. The film traces the tangled trail from the two billion cups of coffee consumed each day back to the coffee farmers who produce the beans, and in the process, provides a compelling documentation of how developed countries like the U.S. subsidize agricultural products, flooding the market with low-priced goods, while demanding that poor countries remove tariff barriers and open their markets. It follows Tadesse Meskela as he tries to get a living wage for the 70,000 Ethiopian coffee farmers he represents. Meskela, the representative of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union in Southern Ethiopia, seeks to circumvent the global commodity exchanges by tirelessly traveling the world selling premium grade coffee directly to coffee roasters who will pay more for his high grade product and who support the idea of paying farmers a living wage. He returns the profits to the cooperative members who use the extra income to build the schools and infrastructure needed to develop their communities. In total, Black Gold provides the most in-depth study of any commodity on film today and offers a compelling introduction to the “fair trade” movement galvanizing consumers around the globe. 77 minutes.

Cities of Light takes viewers on an epic journey back into one of the most fascinating and important periods of world history. It tells a story of vital importance for our contemporary world about the triumphs and shortcomings, achievements and ultimate failures of a centuries-long period when Muslims, Christians and Jews inhabited the same far corner of Western Europe and built a society that lit the Dark Ages. Cities of Light shows how it was possible for Muslims, Christians and Jews to co-exist and thrive together—and yet how fragile that union can be when religious extremism begins to rise. The glories of Islamic Spain are beautifully rendered, but the film does not flinch when vividly portraying the violence and horror that ultimately engulfed it—violence that seems similar to what we witness today. The history of Islamic Spain demonstrates that when religious diversity is accommodated within a social and political system, problems and tensions may still exist, but society is able to successfully manage them, generally to the benefit of all. But when a power system or religious movement rejects complexity and insists on a single cultural and religiously-centered point of view, then society is likely to come to grief with everyone losing something. 116 minutes.

Confronting the Pandemic
The YouthAIDS Global Ambassador, Ashley Judd, is teaming up with her
friend Salma Hayek on a one-hour documentary about Judd¹s work with
YouthAIDS. On this trip through Central America, she takes Hayek on an
unforgettable journey.  From the brothels of Guatemala City to the coast
of Honduras, these women are on a mission to get the message out.  It's
a message of hope, these young people can change their future by
changing the behavior that puts them at risk of infection.

Debt of the Dictators: The film asks whether it is fair that poor and innocent people in the world today have to repay the debts of former dictators. The focus of this TV-documentary is the illegitimate debt in Argentina, South Africa, the Philippines, and DR Congo. The documentary looks behind local tourist attractions, and visits the poor neighborhoods of Buenos Aires and the depressing township of Johannesburg, where, where poor youngsters desperately seek jobs. The Journey ends in the slums of Manila. Along the way, the viewer will meet the global debt movements rooted in local civil society: dynamic, popular movements eagerly campaigning for debt cancellation. 58 minutes.

Health for Sale: Health for Sale asks: are the world's largest drug companies, paradoxically, major obstacles to making a healthier world? The film focuses on Big Pharma, the ten largest pharmaceutical makers, who account for 500 billion dollars of world health spending a year and whose 205 billion dollars in pre-tax profits were more than the combined profits of the 490 other Fortune 500 companies. Officials from all sides debate the impact of drug companies' patenting, "intellectual property," pricing and new product development strategies on global public health. These policies, according to Nobel Prize winning economist and former World Bank Chief Economist, Joseph Stiglitz "are condemning billions of the world's poorest citizens to death." 59 minutes.

India's Hidden Plague
In March 2007, YouthAIDS Global Ambassador, acclaimed actress and
philanthropist, Ashley Judd teamed up with the National Geographic
Channel and Bollywood stars to explore how HIV travels from high-risk
groups to the general population and why young women are increasingly at
risk for infection.

Invisible Children is a rough cut documentary made by several young Americans to document the war in Northern Uganda, in which children are being abducted by a rebel army and forced to fight as child soldiers.  AID organizers from across the country that have already seen the film say it is one of the most affecting documentaries they’ve ever watched; as Bethany Egan at Grove City College put it, “I can’t even express to you the impact that it had on my heart and mind.”  You can watch a trailer online here and also learn important information about the film and the movement that it has inspired by downloading the media kit. 55 minutes.

Last Best Chance Thanks to the generous support of the Stanley Foundation, AID is offering Last Best Chance. Last Best Chance is a docudrama that shows the threat posed by vulnerable nuclear weapons and materials around the world and underscores what the stakes are.  In the movie, which was produced by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, al Qaeda operatives organize three separate operations aimed at getting nuclear weapons.  The material is then fabricated into three crude nuclear weapons by small groups of trained terrorists, who have recruited bomb-making experts to help them manufacture their weapons.  To learn more, you can read an article about the film that was in The New Yorker and this transcript from “Meet the Press”.  45 minutes.

Malaria Fever Wars highlights man's interminable fight against malaria, a disease which kills millions every year, and which is continuing to worsen. It delivers an up-to-date account of the global malaria situation from the perspectives of a few heroic individuals, each fighting their own very different battles against the disease. 120 minutes.

Maquilapolis Carmen Durán works the graveyard shift in one of Tijuana’s 800 maquiladoras; she is one of six million women around the world who labor for poverty wages in the factories of transnational corporations. After making television components all night, Carmen comes home to a dirt-floor shack she built out of cast-off garage doors from the U.S., in a neighborhood with no sewage lines or electricity. She suffers from on-the-job kidney damage and lead poisoning from her years of exposure to toxic chemicals. She earns six dollars a day on which she must support herself and her three children.

While Maquilapolis shows that globalization gives corporations the freedom to move around the world seeking cheaper labor and more lax environmental regulations, it also shows that organized workers can successfully demand that the laws be enforced. Thanks to her persistence in demanding severance pay, Carmen’s house now has concrete floors. And thanks to her new knowledge of labor rights, she has since taken another factory to the labor board for a violation similar to Sanyo’s; she hopes one day to go to school and become a labor lawyer. Globalization turns workers into a commodity which can be bought anywhere in the world for the lowest price.

Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet travels in the footsteps of the Prophet to the Arabian desert and the holy city of Mecca where much of Muhammad's story unfolded. But the film does not just stay in the past. Much of its story is told through the observations of contemporary American Muslims, including a fireman at the World Trade Center on September 11, a second generation Arab-American family building a community based on Islamic principles, a Congressional Chief of Staff working for justice, and a refugee fleeing religious persecution, whose experiences in some way echo Muhammad’s life.

With some of the world’s greatest scholars on Islam providing historical context and critical perspective, Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet is history in the present tense. It tells of intrigue and faith, bitter persecution and the birth of a holy book, brutal war and brilliant diplomacy in a desert environment where tribal allegiance was often the only protection.  This 2 hour documentary film aired on PBS in December 2002 and has broadcast worldwide on numerous channels.

Our Voices Together is a short documentary film on the lives of a few families who have lost their loved ones during the tragic attacks of 9/11. From building schools in Afghanistan to providing cultural spaces of dialogue, these families show how their relative's spirit survives through their acts of compassion for others in the Muslim community. Their creation of the organization Our Voices Together encourages others to continue their call for a safer, more compassionate world. 13 minutes.

Outlawed tells the stories of Khaled El-Masri and Binyam Mohamed, two men who have survived extraordinary rendition (a procedure in which a nation sidesteps its human rights commitments by sendingforeign suspects another country for interrogation under less humane conditions), secret detention, and torture by the U.S. government working with various other governments worldwide. Outlawed features relevant commentary from Louise Arbour, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, U.S. President George W. Bush, Michael Scheuer, the chief architect of the rendition program and former head of the Osama Bin Laden unit at the CIA, and Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. Secretary of State. 30 minutes.

A Son's Sacrifice  is a documentary film of 27 year old Imran who takes over a very different family business- a traditional Muslim slaughterhouse in New York City. But his father's demands and the community's doubts may prove too much for him. On the holiest day of the year, Imran must lead a sacrifice that will define him as a Muslim, as an American, and as a son. A Son's Sacrifice is the winner of the "Best Documentary Short" at the TriBeCa Film Festival. 27 minutes.

Silent Killers is a powerful new documentary that tells us that there are still a billion hungry people in the world and that 15,000 children die each day of hunger.  Taking us to South Africa, Kenya and Brazil, the documentary provides the viewer with a message of optimism that innovative programs are showing us how global hunger can be eradicated. 57 minutes.

The Day My God Died is a feature-length documentary that presents the stories of young girls whose lives have been shattered by the child sex trade. They describe the day they were abducted from their village and sold into sexual servitude as, “The Day My God Died.” The film provides actual footage from the brothels of Bombay, known even to tourists as “The Cages,” captured with “spy camera” technology. It weaves the stories of girls, and their stolen hopes and dreams, into an unforgettable examination of the growing plague of child sex slavery.

The Peacekeepers  With unprecedented access to the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping, The Peacekeepers provides an intimate and dramatic portrait of the struggle to save "a failed state."The film follows the determined and often desperate manoeuvres to avert another Rwandan disaster, this time in the Democratic Republic of Congo (the DRC). Focusing on the UN mission, the film cuts back and forth between the United Nations headquarters in New York and events on the ground in the DRC. We are with the peacekeepers in the 'Crisis Room' as they balance the risk of loss of life on the ground with the enormous sums of money required from uncertain donor countries. We are with UN troops as the northeast Congo erupts and the future of the DRC, if not all of central Africa, hangs in the balance. 83 minutes.

Tracking the Monster
This VH1 News documentary chronicles two emotional journeys to Africa
by Golden Globe nominee Ashley Judd and Grammy winner India.Arie. They
travel to the front lines of the global fight against HIV/AIDS. Through
their eyes and in their own words, Ashley and India.Arie tell the
stories of lives forever changed by the pandemic and witness how the
disease is decimating communities in Kenya and Madagascar.

Uganda Rising  tells the story of what has been called the world's "biggest hostage crisis", where more than 2 million Acholi living in northern Uganda have been held hostage and terrorized for the past 20 years by a group of rebels known as the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), led by their spiritual and military leader Joseph Kony. 82 minutes.

AID also has a partnership with HBO, and you can request any of the films listed on the HBO website. Please email sarah@aidemocracy.org with HBO film requests.