
John Pilger
Director · 1939 – 2023 · Sydney, Australia
John Richard Pilger was an Emmy Award winning Australian journalist based in London. Pilger lived in the United Kingdom from 1962. Since his early years as a war correspondent in Vietnam, Pilger was a strong critic of American, Australian and British foreign policy, which he considered to be driven by an imperialist agenda. Pilger also criticised his native country's treatment of indigenous Australians and the practices of the mainstream media. In the British print media, he had a long association with the Daily Mirror, and wrote a fortnightly column for the New Statesman magazine. Pilger twice won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award, in 1967 and 1979. His documentaries, screened internationally, have gained awards in Britain and worldwide. He also received several honorary doctorates, and was a visiting professor at Cornell University.
Movies21
Movie7.5HistoryDocumentarySet both in Latin America and the United States, the film explores the historic and current relationship of Washington with countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile. Pilger says that the film "...tells a universal story... analysing and revealing, through vivid testimony, the story of great power behind its venerable myths. It allows us to understand the true nature of the so-called "war on terror". According to Pilger, the film’s message is that the greed and power of empire is not invincible and that people power is always the "seed beneath the snow".
The War on Democracy
2007 · 41 votes
Movie6.0DocumentaryExamining the meaning and significance of the insights that WikiLeaks shared with the world, the resulting behaviour of the governments involved, the extraordinary personal risk taken by Assange, and the wider fundamental issues around press freedom that affect all of us and our right to know.
The Trust Fall: Julian Assange
2024 · 2 votes
Movie7.8DocumentaryThis film investigates how the media has reported war, from the First World War to the present day.
The War You Don't See
2010 · 37 votes
Movie6.5DocumentaryJohn Pilger reveals what the news doesn't - that the United States and the world's second economic power, China (both nuclear armed) are on the road to war. Pilger's film is a warning and an inspiring story of resistance.
The Coming War on China
2016 · 30 votes
- Movie9.0HistoryDocumentary
The shameful history of persecution of the Aborigines in Australia. The secret history of Australia is a historical conspiracy of silence. Written history has long applied selectivity to what it records, largely ignoring the shameful way that the Aborigines were, and continue to be, treated. Because Aborigines had not cultivated the land they were seen by British colonists as having no proprietorial rights to the land. They had no treaty and therefore no rights under British colonial rule. Little of their resistance is recorded.
The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back
1986 · 1 votes
Movie7.4DocumentaryA documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has lasted for more than 50 years. Contains some interviews with the children in this conflict.
Palestine Is Still the Issue
2003 · 5 votes
MovieDocumentaryWar By Other Means is a 1992 television documentary by John Pilger and David Munro concerning loans to developing countries from the World Bank which cause them to pay more interest then they ever receive in international aid ("debt as a weapon"). It also analyses Structural Adjustment Programs, which are proclaimed to enable countries to compete in the global economy, but have the effect of lowering wages which results in the transfer of wealth from poor to rich. It features Dr. Susan George, author of The Debt Boomerang.
MovieDocumentaryDocumentary 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 conditional discharge. Helen, charged with stealing a pair of slippers but with no previous convictions, recalls her day in Holloway Prison, London, which started at 7am when she joined 96 other prisoners in a rush to use four toilets whose conditions were “disgusting”. Between then and lunchtime, all prisoners were locked up, with just half-an-hour’s walk round a large yard for exercise. Lunch was eaten in cells, with tea at 3.30pm, before they were locked up until the following morning.
MovieDocumentaryIn 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 a “Zap Office” – officially, the Office of Multilateral Diplomacy – specially set up in the State Department to monitor voting patterns.
Movie7.0DocumentaryThe sensational expose of the complicity of Britain, USA and Australia in the continuing genocide in East Timor.
Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy
1994 · 8 votes
Movie6.6DocumentaryThe myths of globalisation have been incorporated into much of our everyday language. "Thinking globally" and "the global economy" are part of a jargon that assumes we are all part of one big global village, where national borders and national identities no longer matter. But what is globalisation? And where is this global village? In 2001, John Pilger made 'The New Rulers of the World', a film exploring the impact of globalisation. It took Indonesia as the prime example, a country that the World Bank described as a 'model pupil' until its 'globalised' economy collapsed in 1998. Globalisation has not only made the world smaller. It has also made it interdependent. An investment decision made in London can spell unemployment for thousands in Indonesia, while a business decision taken in Tokyo can create thousands of new jobs for workers in north-east England.
The New Rulers of the World
2001 · 8 votes
Movie7.0DocumentaryBurp! 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 paid for by the US war department.
Burp! Pepsi v. Coke in the Ice-Cold War
1984 · 2 votes
Movie5.7DocumentaryDocumentary by John Pilger looks at the awful truth behind white Australia's dysfunctional relationship with Indigenous Australians
Utopia
2013 · 10 votes
- Movie8.2Documentary
In this, the first of his 58 documentary films, John Pilger combines candid interviews and amazing frontline footage of Vietnam to portray a growing rift between the US military bureaucrats - "lifers" - and the soldiers who physically and mentally fight the war on the ground, the "grunts". By 1970, it is an internal sense of disillusionment and frustration born from this rift that is triggering the withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam.
Vietnam: The Quiet Mutiny
1970 · 3 votes
MovieDocumentaryThis 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 features 36-year-old Jack Walker, a dye house worker, and is intended to present the views of a rank-and-file trade unionist: his life, struggle and hopes.
Movie7.3DocumentaryA critical documentary about the war on terror since 9-11.
Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror
2003 · 10 votes
- MovieDocumentary
Welcome to Australia is a 1999 Carlton Television documentary, written and presented by John Pilger, which was directed and produced by Alan Lowery, and charts the history of injustice endured by indigenous Australians in the context of the build-up to the Sydney 2000 Summer Olympic Games.
- MovieDocumentary
Britain is still a world leader. Indeed it has twenty percent of a world market, second only to the United States. And this industry is considered so important by the government that it consumes almost half of all research and development funds. Strangely it produces not consumer goods that people want, but machines that hardly any of us use or want to use. Moreover, for all its’ preeminence, its’ future is uncertain and depends to a large degree on secret deals with some of the most corrupt and brutal regimes on Earth. One of the biggest manufacturing industries in Britain at the close of the century is ARMS. John Pilger and David Munro look behind the political rhetoric and discover the world of international arms dealing.
MovieDocumentaryIn 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 and Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech on immigration four years later put attitudes towards ethnic minorities on the political and social agenda. In One British Family, made in 1974, John Pilger focuses on Gus and Julie Gill, who arrived in Britain from Trinidad in 1961. They now had three children and their own house on Tyneside, where they were the only black family in the street. “They take less from the social services than the equivalent white families,” says Pilger. “They’re not on any council’s housing lists and they’ve never been out of work.”
Movie9.0DocumentaryJohn Pilger unearths the hidden agenda behind the NHS crisis.
The Dirty War on the NHS
2019 · 2 votes
MovieDocumentaryAmerican defence policy under Gerald Ford, successor to a disgraced president, is the subject of Mr Nixon’s Secret Legacy. John Pilger says that military thinkers in Washington are for the first time “thinking the unthinkable” and Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union announced by Ford and Henry Kissinger are “no more than a sham”. Before resigning over Watergate, President Richard Nixon had given Pentagon generals a flexible strategy that would blur the distinction between conventional and nuclear warfare.
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TV7.0NewsDocumentaryWorld in Action was Granada Television’s flagship ITV current affairs series, running from 7 Jan 1963 to 7 Dec 1998, and built a reputation for film-led investigative reporting and a forceful editorial stance. Its journalism produced major public and political repercussions—including investigations associated with miscarriages of justice such as the Birmingham Six—and it also served as a platform for landmark documentary projects, including the first broadcast of “Seven Up!” as part of the strand in 1964.
World in Action
1963 · 2 votes