The Globalisation Tapes 71 minutes, 2003
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The Globalisation Tapes: a collaboration between the Independent Plantation Workers' Union of Sumatra (Indonesia), the International Union of Food and Agricultural Workers (IUF), and Vision Machine Film Project.

Sharman Sinaga's granddaughter looks bored as her grandfather demonstrates for the camera his favored technique of market liberalization: holding union activists upside down in flooded fields. He mimics their gargles as they choke in the mud. He could hold down two or three at a time he boasts; he seems faintly nostalgic in the dim light and the smoke; his only regret, that his arms and knees aren't what they used to be.

The orders to hold people upside-down came from the top, he tells us, from Surhato; they came also with support from high on Capitol Hill.

The Globalisation Tapes were made in collaboration with those a little further down the pile, closer to the mud (and the rubber and the oil), closer to the memories of the massacre that cleared the way for Indonesia's 'modernisation'.

Using their own forbidden history as a case study, the Indonesian filmmakers trace the development of contemporary globalisation from its roots in colonialism to the present. Through chilling first-hand accounts, hilarious improvised interventions, collective debate and archival collage, The Globalisation Tapes exposes the devastating role of militarism and repression in building the "global economy", and explores the relationships between trade, third-world debt, and international institutions like the IMF and the World Trade Organization. The film is a densely lyrical and incisive account of how these institutions shape and enforce the corporate world order (and its 'systems of chaos').

Plantation workers spontaneously stage a satirical commercial for the pesticide that poisons them; the filmmakers pose as World Bank agents with offers to 'develop' local businesses - offers which are both brutal and absurd, yet, tempting, nonetheless. The Globalisation Tapes is a testament to the intelligence, humour, integrity and creativity of its makers and their community.

It is not only inspirational, but also instructive. The film illustrates the kind of training that is needed if unions are to build an international movement to fight corporate globalisation from the grassroots.

The story isn't told by experts, but by union members from palm oil plantations in Indonesia. This film was made possible by their energy, insight and dedication.

"If we are united in our struggle against worker oppression, united in our search for truth amidst lies, united for a truly participatory democratic economic system, the possibilities are only limited by our courage, our determination, and our capacity to imagine."

- Su Karman, narrator of The Globalisation Tapes and President of Perbbuni, the Independent Plantation Workers' Union of Sumatra.

The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow 15mins

From today's menu, I recommend Capitalism or Cannibalism; Communism is off. Our Catholicism is rather good, though; it comes with a liberal sauce or tourist topping. This is our pre-theatre-of-poverty menu.

Meanwhile, The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow grows over-rapidly large on a forced steroidal diet. Elsewhere, the cousins of The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow pluck and hack in feathered ecstasy over the carcass of a chicken too careless crossing the road. This bright and colourful scene is but a moment of a clamorous market economy busy with flies and children; industrious striped-potbellied pigs rummaging through heaps between houses half-sunk in muddy water, while villagers jump from stone to stone.

Cannibalism has long been a favourite on western menus. Other peoples' cannibalism, that is. More than a colonial culinary oddity, it divided the men from the animals; the savagery of the conquistadors was projected onto their victims - after all, they, too, sported feathers. Rumours of cannibalism persist in tourist guides and travel books today; some people still wear feathers (though most of them have long since died of influenza).

Specially bred with less feathers and more meat, The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow is a film that dream-walks from the beaches of Mirtsdroy, where huge tourists, plucked and oiled, baste themselves standing up, to the muddy markets of Sumatra, via an archipelago of Export-Processing zones and television archives. Hand processed with bacterially cultured stock, the images are themselves in organic decay; all the colours and forms of the scrap heap.

Between dream and nightmare, The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow is a traversal of here and elsewhere, first and third world; a fairytale of production, resources, capitalism, globalisation, refuse and refusal: The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow is a film not about the struggle to be seen, but about the struggle to see.