United Red Army (2007), End of the Line: The Women of Standing Rock (2021), The Weather Underground (2003), ...So Goes the Nation (2006), 12th & Delaware (2010), Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation (2019), Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (2003) ... Let's take a look at the ranked list of the best Social Movement movies.
Storyline: Thousands of citizens of Myanmar take to the streets in several cities to protest the Asian nation's repressive regime. The protests take on a new degree of seriousness when dozens of monks launch their own marches down city streets. This documentary from Anders Ostergaard focuses on the work of videographers and citizen journalists who defy the government's crackdown on the media -- a brave bunch who manage to transmit footage of the uprising to the outside world.
Plot Keywords: documentary, journalist, protest, human rights, press freedom, political, revolution ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: In 1920, the anarchist Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco (Riccardo Cucciolla) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (Gian Maria Volonté) are sentenced to death, falsely accused of a robbery and murder. Indeed they are condemned due to their political beliefs, in one of the most shameful and hypocrite judgments of the human history.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Plot Keywords: history, documentary, political, social justice, immigration, anarchism, trial ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: In 1984 20 year old closet gay Joe hesitantly arrives in London from Bromley for his first Gay Pride march and is taken under the collective wing of a group of gay men and Lesbian Steph, who meet at flamboyant Jonathan and his Welsh partner Gethin's Soho bookshop. Not only are gays being threatened by Thatcher but the miners are on strike in response to her pit closures and Northern Irish activist Mark Ashton believes gays and miners should show solidarity. Almost by accident a mini-bus full of gays find themselves in the Welsh village of Onllwyn in the Dulais valley and through their sincere fund raising and Jonathan's nifty disco moves persuade most of the community that they are on the same side. When a bigot tries to sabotage the partnership with a tabloid smear Mark turns it back on her with a hugely successful benefit concert to which most of the villagers, now thoroughly in tune with their gay friends, turn up. The miners are defeated and return to work but at the Pride march ...
Plot Keywords: history, lgbt, uk, solidarity, 1980s, wales, social movement ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Documentary with a selection from a non-stop 7-hour musical event at Watts, the Los Angeles Coliseum, August 20, 1972. It's a sort of Woodstock event but with black artists, namely the groups Dramatics, Staple Singers, Rance Allen Group, Emotions, Bar Kays, Mel & Tim.—Artemis-9
Plot Keywords: concert, documentary, music festival, black culture, live performance, 1970s, los angeles ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Biograpical epic of Malcolm X, the legendary African American leader. Born Malcolm Little, his father (a Garveyite Baptist minister) was killed by the Ku Klux Klan. Malcolm became a gangster, and while in jail discovered the Nation of Islam writings of Elijah Muhammad. He preaches the teachings when let out of jail, but later on goes on a pilgrimage to the city of Mecca, there he converts to the original Islamic religion and becomes a Sunni Muslim and changes his name to El-Hajj Malik Al-Shabazz. He is assassinated on February 21, 1965 and dies a Muslim martyr.
Plot Keywords: biography, history, drama, usa, race, civil rights, islam ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: As a parting shot, fired reporter Ann Mitchell prints a fake letter from unemployed "John Doe," who threatens suicide in protest of social ills. The paper is forced to rehire Ann and hires John Willoughby to impersonate "Doe." Ann and her bosses cynically milk the story for all it's worth, until the made-up "John Doe" philosophy starts a whole political movement. At last everyone, even Ann, takes her creation seriously...but publisher D.B. Norton has a secret plan.
Plot Keywords: political, social, comedy, drama, black comedy, media, corruption ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: In 1971, a group of friends sail into a nuclear test zone, and their protest captures the world's imagination. Using never before seen archive that brings their extraordinary world to life, How To Change The World is the story of the pioneers who founded Greenpeace and defined the modern green movement.
Plot Keywords: documentary, activism, environment, conservation, protest, ecology, nature ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Following up on 'Bowling for Columbine', film-maker Michael Moore provides deep and though-provoking insights on the American security system, the level of paranoia, fear, uncertainty, false values and patriotism, which all combined together to set a stage for George W. Bush to launch a war on Iraq instead of focusing on getting the real culprit(s) behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This documentary also focuses on how some Saudis were safely and secretly flown out of America while planes were ostensibly grounded after the attacks. Archived film footage, candid interviews with politicians, and an overall waste of public funds for a war that was initiated on false pretension to wit: a weapon of mass distraction - to take the focus away from the real enemy and get Americans glued to their TV sets to watch innocent Iraqis and Afghans getting killed. And a war that would eventually alienate the U.S.A. and it's citizens from almost every country on Earth.—rAjOo (gunwanti@hotmail.com)
Plot Keywords: political documentary, anti-war, 9/11 attacks, iraq war, conspiracy theory, war propaganda, social justice ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: In a Scottish town in 1974, factory workers refuse to carry out repairs on warplane engines in an act of solidarity against the violent military coup in Chile. Four years pass before the engines, left to rust in factory yard, mysteriously disappear in the middle of the night.
Plot Keywords: documentary, history, politics, scotland, working class, social movement, solidarity ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Ken Burns' portrait of Louisiana governor/U.S. senator Huey Long.
Plot Keywords: documentary, history, politics, biography, usa, louisiana, social reform ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: The unforgettable true story chronicles the tumultuous three-month period in 1965, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a dangerous campaign to secure equal voting rights in the face of violent opposition. The epic march from Selma to Montgomery culminated in President Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most significant victories for the civil rights movement. Director Ava DuVernay's "Selma" tells the story of how the revered leader and visionary Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and his brothers and sisters in the movement prompted change that forever altered history.
Plot Keywords: history, biography, drama, american history, racial equality, social justice, politics ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Through a chronological history of the South African liberation struggle, this documentary cites examples of the way that music was used in the fight for freedom. Songs united those who were being oppressed and gave those fighting a way to express their plight. The music consoled those incarcerated, and created an effective underground form of communication inside the prisons.—Sujit R. Varma
Plot Keywords: documentary, music, south africa, revolution, apartheid, freedom, protest ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: A worker becomes a "man of iron" forged by experience, a son comes to terms with his father, a couple fall in love, a reporter searches for courage, and a nation undergoes historic change. In Warsaw in 1980, the Party sends Winkel, a weak, alcoholic TV hack, to Gdansk to dig up dirt on the shipyard strikers, particularly on Maciek Tomczyk, an articulate worker whose father was killed in the December 1970 protests. Posing as sympathetic, Winkel interviews people who know Tomczyk, including his detained wife, Agnieszka. Their narrations become flashbacks using actual news footage of 1968 and 1970 protests and of the later birth of free unions and Solidarity.—<jhailey@hotmail.com>
Plot Keywords: history, politics, working class, solidarity, poland, biography, social movement ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Spanish director Sebastián, his executive producer Costa and all his crew are in Bolivia, in the Cochabamba area, to shoot a motion picture about Christopher Columbus, his first explorations and the way the Spaniards treated the Indians at the time. Costa has chosen this place because the budget of the film is tight and here he can hire supernumeraries, local actors and extras on the cheap. Things go more or less smoothly until a conflict erupts over the privatization of the water supply. The trouble is that one of the local actors, is a leading activist in the protest movement.
Plot Keywords: history, colonialism, resistance, filmmaking, social justice, globalization, exploitation ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Germany in the 1970s: Murderous bomb attacks, the threat of terrorism and the fear of the enemy inside are rocking the very foundations of the yet fragile German democracy. The radicalised children of the Nazi generation lead by Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin are fighting a violent war against what they perceive as the new face of fascism: American imperialism supported by the German establishment, many of whom have a Nazi past. Their aim is to create a more human society but by employing inhuman means they not only spread terror and bloodshed, they also lose their own humanity. The man who understands them is also their hunter: the head of the German police force Horst Herold. And while he succeeds in his relentless pursuit of the young terrorists, he knows he's only dealing with the tip of the iceberg.
Plot Keywords: history, political, germany, terrorism, revolution, radical, violence ...
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