Luc Hermann

How the American coffee chain, now global, has conquered the urban middle class. This investigation on three continents reveals the carefully hidden face of the brand.

Inspired by the mythology of the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, over 300 foreign volunteers chose to give up their comfortable lives and go fight ISIS in Raqqa. We filmed them there, fly-on-the-wall style, fighting, talking, laughing, being attacked by suicide bombs and sniper fire. We were with them until Raqqa was freed. And then we followed them back home – changed forever. Every night, between July and October 2017, young men with no previous military experience pushed through the most dangerous streets of the world. They conquered Raqqa, block after block. They met death and violence. And eventually, along with the Kurdish and Arab forces of the Syrian Democratic Forces, they liberated Raqqa and ended the reign of the most murderous cult of the XXI century. Some of them went back home. We were there when they told their story to their families. This is the untold story of the young Westerners who left everything behind to fight ISIS.

A year ago, thanks to the precious support of 7819 people, we started a journey in democracy (s). Over the weeks and months, according to meetings, exchanges and readings, we questioned this strange word: democracy. In France but also in Greece, Iceland, Belgium and Spain, we met citizens who are working to insert more democracy in their daily lives. Here is, in 90 minutes, the result of this adventure to try to grasp what this word contains.

Investigative journalists working for Disclose spent over a year investigating the production chain of the furniture giant which generated a 44.6 billion euros revenue in 2022 and attracts over 5 billion visitors to its stores and website every year. From the boreal forests of Sweden to Brazilian plantations and New Zealand coastlines, they uncovered how IKEA intensively exploits wood around the world, fuels the illegal trafficking of this resource and threatens the last precious European forests. Long overlooked, intensive logging is now sparking outrage and anger among citizens in Poland and the Baltic countries, who are increasingly concerned about the fate of their countries' public forest domains and biodiversity loss. In Romania, where IKEA owns 50,000 hectares of forests, activists are risking their lives mobilizing against the timber mafia. This film tells the expansion of a discreet forest predator, grappling with the limits of the planet's resources.

In February 2014, paramilitary groups fought against the police in the streets of Kyev and ousted President Yanukovych. They settled a new government. According to western media, they were the revolution heroes. But they are actually heavily armed extreme-right militias. The Right Sector, Azov or Svoboda created parallel irregular forces that easily go out of control. In Odessa, in May 2014, they were responsible for burning 45 people to death without facing any charges. How come western democracies haven’t raised their voice in protest? Most likely because these Ukrainian nationalist militias actually played a significant role in a much larger scale war. The Ukrainian revolution was strongly supported by the US diplomacy. In the new cold war that opposes Russia to the USA, Ukraine is a decisive pawn. A tactical pawn to contain Putin’s ambitions. “Ukraine, masks of the revolution” by Paul Moreira sheds light on this blind corner.

We're at the beginning of an artificial intelligence revolution that promises to change everything. Already, virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa have become a part of our daily life. But in order to run their applications, digital giants like Amazon, Google and Facebook, employ an army of invisible labour. These are disposable workers, paid as little as 10 cents an hour to feed information into computer systems. They receive neither benefits nor contract and normal labor law doesn't apply to them. Whilst millions of men and women are training artificial intelligence for next to nothing, others are being hired and hide out of sight to clean up social networks. We went undercover as one of these web cleaners, working as a content moderator for Facebook. To meet the workers hiding behind your screen, we're taking you to the factory of the future, one of the digital economy's best kept secrets.

Green Warriors Indonesia: The World’s Most Polluted River is a film by Martin Boudot (2018) that investigates the impacts of the pollution of the Citarum River in Indonesia. The film highlights the implications of textile factories’ poor wastewater treatment practices on public health, and shows how these are partly driven by the consequences of the unequal power dynamics between the factories and the multinational garment companies based in the ‘West’. Boudot challenges the viewer to increase consumer demand for eco-label garments as a way to try and address this. This analysis finds that in doing so, the film foregrounds investigation undertaken by the European reporters at the expense of contributions of local research and activism, rendering it archetypal of the “white saviour industrial complex” (Cole, 2012).