People Power

Cultural wars have transformed politics in the US into identity politics dividing the electorate and calcifying political differences and party loyalties. For the past decades, abortion divided the country and the voters. Now it’s public libraries that have been transformed into the new battlefields in America’s cultural wars. How can one explain this seemingly sudden focus on books, in school and public libraries? What is behind this rise in censorship? This film follows four distinct stories that illuminate and explain the evolution of this newest battleground in America’s long culture war.

Capitalism has been the engine of unprecedented economic growth and social transformation. With the fall of the communist states and the triumph of "neo-liberalism", capitalism is by far the world's dominant ideology. But how much do we understand about how it originated, and what makes it work?

Director Ilan Ziv traces the origins of antisemitism in France from the Middle Ages to the Dreyfus Affair. Combining personal and collective narratives, Ziv showcases how the depiction of "the Jew" in society established an ideology of hate that eventually led to the Holocaust. In the aftermath of the war, a devastated France continued this ideology of antisemitism that set the stage for a modern wave of anti-Jewish sentiment and attacks, including the murders of Ilan Halimi and Mireille Knoll.

How the war on terror launched by the Bush administration after September 11 has worsened the threat of terrorism.

Today, Israel and the United States are Iran's enemies par excellence. Their reconciliation seems impossible. Is the history of these three countries the chronicle of a war foretold, delayed for decades but inevitable?

A true story of hate, revenge, understanding, remorse and redemption as lived by Mark Stroman on the Texas Death Row.

An in-depth look at news stories. Documentaries that take you behind the scenes giving an insight into people's lives or institutions.

CAPITALISM is an ambitious and accessible six-part documentary series that looks at both the history of ideas and the social forces that have shaped the capitalist world. Blending interviews with some of the world’s great historians, economists, anthropologists, and social critics with on-the-ground footage shot in twenty-two countries, CAPITALISM questions the myth of the unfettered free market, explores the nature of debt and commodities, and retraces some of the great economic debates of the last 200 years. The series features some of the world’s top economists, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists, including Thomas Piketty, Noam Chomsky, Yanis Varoufakis, Nicholas Phillipson, Kari Polanyi Levitt, David Graeber, and Abraham Rotstein. - icarusfilms.com

Thirty-six years ago a new era in global terrorism was born. Just moments after lift-off on the morning of September 6, 1970, passengers on TWA's flight 74 from Frankfurt to New York were startled to hear an announcement over the plane's PA system: "This is your new captain speaking. This flight has been taken over by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine." Minutes later, travelers on another New York-bound plane, Swissair Flight 100, faced the same chilling reality. Featuring first-hand recollections from former hostages, flight crews, and their captors, Hijacked, an hour-long documentary from award-winning producer Ilan Ziv, tells the story of what would be known for more than three decades as the blackest day in aviation history.

The shooting lasted on six tense days in June 1967, but the Six Day War has never really ended. Every crisis that has ripped through this region in the ensuing decades stems from those six fateful days.

Before September 11, 2001, only some 400 people had pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda. But now there are tens of thousands of jihadist militants on several continents. Terrorist attacks have multiplied around the world, straining relations between the West, its minority populations and Muslim nations. By violating the democratic values it claimed to be defending, the “War on Terror” launched by George W. Bush’s administration in the wake of 9/11 had the effect of a hammer smashing a vial of mercury. It scattered what had been a limited threat, turning it into a permanent global conflict – one that has provided fertile ground for recruiting jihadists and swelling the ranks of increasingly powerful xenophobic groups in the United States and Europe.

After fighting as an Israeli soldier in the 1973 war, and troubled by the nation's obsessive mixing of the Bible with politics, the filmmaker left for America, which he considered a "safe haven" because of its separation between church and state. Thirty-five years later, alarmed by the prominent role of religion in the 2008 American presidential campaign, he decides to make a road trip, to try and understand the phenomenon. Rather than follow the candidates, however, Ziv decides to meet with religious activists supporting the Democratic and Republican candidates. From the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries to Super Tuesday in Oklahoma, JESUS POLITICS shows the efforts of Baptist activists for Obama, Catholics and evangelicals for McCain, Christian conservatives for Huckabee, as well as the political efforts of evangelical organizations such as Christians United for Israel.