Documentary filmmakers and journalists may breathe a partial sigh of relief today as the Court of Appeals has issued a largely positive order in the case of documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger. Attorney Michael C. Donaldson filed an Amicus Brief on behalf of the Writers Guild of America, East, as well as 22 other industry organizations and individuals, who saw an earlier court order for Berlinger to turn over footage he filmed making CRUDE, The Real Price of Oil as a grave threat to the future of investigative documentaries.

Environmentalists are like worms.

There has been sudden explosion in documentaries looking at the problems and politics of water. Films like Water Life, Blue Gold, Thirst, Flow, The Water Front and others have focused their attention towards a contemporary issue facing the whole planet: access to clean water and water sustainability. Liz Marshall’s new documentary Water on the Table focuses in even closer, following water rights advocate Maude Barlow as she tirelessly fights, lobbies, talks, and debates her way toward a future where the world will secure accessible, clean and sustainable water resources for all. This is an urgent issue, as urgent as fossil fuels, and thinking otherwise is to dream in the plenitude of the west. Water is running out. Water is being privatized, commodified, bottled and packaged like cream cheese and water is being fought over. Many are already desperately going without and many are sketching out policies that will spell a future of water-as-commodity.

The first film I was able to catch at this year’s One World Human Rights Film Festival was A Place Without People documenting the expulsion of the Maasai from the Serengeti in Tanzania. “Can’t at least we preserve the Serengeti for the animals and the people who come after us,” exclaimed Bernhard Grzimek, a German conservationist/zooligist famous for inspiring the creation of the Serengeti National Park. By this statement I presume he meant preserve it for other colonialists and not the Maasai, the parks original inhabitants. From British rule up to the country’s present day independent government, those in power have failed to recognize the tribe’s place in the park’s ecosystem and their role in preserving its balance for centuries.

Michael Moore’s latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story takes aim at the elite bankers and CEOs who are steering America’s economy into the gutter, and among the bad guys he goes after is none other than the world’s largest and most brutal retailer, Wal-Mart (now re-branded as Walmart). Moore exposes Walmart’s dirty practice of taking out insurance claims on its employees and cashing in on their deaths without telling their families.

Two minutes into The Art of the Steal, I knew I was not about to watch an impartial documentary. The overbearingly ominous music indicated to me at once that this was going to be a slow revelation of a vast and disconcerting conspiracy (at one point I even thought I heard Black Sabbath). Despite its obvious partiality, however, the film was entertaining, informative, and well-paced throughout, and will at the very least serve as a basic primer to those who are new to the complexities of the almost two decade long struggle to wrest the Barnes museum from its home in Lower Merion to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia.

Great working allegory for Health Reform in old movies.

Our future played in the cinema, circa 1976.

How we project ourselves onto the great stage.

To see a universe in spilld ink on wite cards, or lights flashing in the dark.