Global Docs Project

My new project is to watch one documentary (usually something random I find online) about each country in the world, in alphabetical order. From the people with too much time on their hands who brought you the "My Places Project".

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Mission Accomplished

Hello all, I just wanted to thank everyone who has supported us on this great journey around the world! Yesterday’s entry for Zimbabwe completed the A-Z run through every country in the world, around 200 of them. So the question becomes, where do we go from here? Well, I am definitely going to take a hiatus of some sort, but I enjoyed this so much that I would love to keep going in some form. There’s definitely more out there where these documentaries came from.

So I have an idea to keep this blog going, which is to do a project of documentaries about the 200 largest cities in the world (in terms of population), from A to Z. Now, there’s no one universally agreed upon way to define how large a city is, so a while back when I was bored I came up with my own list compiled from a variety of sources, from Abidjan to Zhengzhou. However, there isn’t a lot of point to it if no one else is reading this, so I wondered if any of our followers would be interested in that? Just let us know!

As for the rest, if there’s one thing I would want people to take away from all this, it’s that everyone, whether they live in squalid conditions in Africa or in a sleek high-rise in Vancouver, is a real person. We’re all the stars of our own movies, so to speak. This isn’t to say that most people are sociopaths per se, but I think it is very hard for most of us to really, truly believe that everyone is else is really there living their own lives inside their own heads, and it’s even harder for us if that person is living a life that’s very alien from our own daily experiences. That’s something I try very hard to remember every day.

So, should this blog continue with a “Cities A-Z” project?

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ZIMBABWE

This is the third entry from the “Lost Kingdoms of Africa” series to feature on this Project, after Ethiopia and Morocco. It centers around the incredible ancient city of Great Zimbabwe, the huge stone ruin after which this African nation is named. It was considered such a feat that when Europeans first found it they refused to believe Africans could have built it, a belief that persisted under the racist Rhodesia colonial regime. This documentary actually doesn’t visit the nation of Zimbabwe until about two thirds of the way through, taking its time to visit the trading partners and cities made out of coral on the Swahili Coast, in modern day Tanzania and Mozambique. This is part of an effort to show not just the city itself, but to make sure the viewer understands that this was an African city built by some locals who were rich off the gold trade. Many people don’t know about Great Zimbabwe, but even today it is very impressive.

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ZAMBIA

This documentary, produced “in association with” French TV, highlights the plight of a specific town in Zambia that is dominated by a Copper extraction plant run by Glencore, a Swiss company that has become one of the world’s largest commodities producers despite many shady legal dealings in both the US and France (Bill Clinton pardoned its founder, Marc Rich, as one of his last actions in office). The EU funds the plant as part of a program to improve Africa’s economy, but, due to sell-offs meant to help pay the country’s huge foreign debts, almost all of the money generated by the plant and others like it leaves the country. As one statistic cited shows, Norway gets 40% of the profits from oil extracted from its territory, while Zambia receives only 2% of profits from copper extracted from its territory, despite copper today being one of the world’s most valuable metals. In addition, the plant pollutes heavily, a fact which European visitors find hard to credit, simply because it’s not supposed to, but air readings taken during the documentary back up the claims of the populace that they are being severely poisoned. This is an interesting case study, if a particularly didactic one, of the current state of the economy in much of Africa. Unfortunately it ends just as the populace of the town is getting organized for a lawsuit in EU courts... I would like to see what happens next!

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YEMEN

This is another country currently in the middle of an awful war where I wanted to find something it had going for it instead of against it. The short film I watched concentrates on a group of paragliders who visit the island of Socotra, which is part of Yemen and situated in the Strait partway between mainland Arabia and the Horn of Africa. Socotra is a unique place, barely visited (due to the various political situations of the surrounding nations, its own geographical isolation, and the fact that it sits in the middle of the so-called “Pirate lanes” off Somalia. It is sometimes known as the “most alien-looking place on Earth,” and for good reason. The flora and fauna here have been isolated from the rest of the world for several million years, and have taken their own evolutionary path. The trees in particular look crazily like something out of a science fiction movie. Most famous is the so-called “Dragonblood tree”, the sap of which is highly valued as a dye and which has to be seen to be believes. The documentary itself seems little concerned with pacing, but turns this into a strength. It consists almost entirely of long shots of paragliders in HD against spectacular backgrounds, with a few interesting interludes.

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WESTERN SAHARA

This is the last, and probably most disputed, of the several countries I chose to include whose status as an independent nation is at least somewhat in question. Western Sahara is one of the only land masses (outside of Antarctica) where no authority is recognized by the United Nations. Morocco occupies much of the nation, though its claim is not recognized by most nations. The competing authority is the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), sometimes called “The Polisario Front”, which runs a full government in exile from refugee camps in southern Algeria and controls a small strip of “Liberated Territories” separated by a “sand wall” from the Moroccan territories. In 1991, the UN said there should be a referendum held to determine sovereignty and started talks, but there has been little progress, and large groups of Sahrawis have remained in desert refugee camps for the past 30 years, refusing to give up their lands. This report by Vice News embeds a reporter with the Sahrawi. While there may be two sides to the story, this one only shows one heavily anti-Moroccan side. From a human perspective it is extremely interesting, however, a visit to a strange, flat, almost featureless part of the world that most people don’t really think about. A warning, there are some graphic descriptions of war atrocities.

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VIETNAM

All of the rest of the top Vietnam documentaries on Youtube were about the Vietnam War, when I was more interested in present-day Vietnam. This episode of the Discovery Channel “Ultimate Journeys” series (previously seen in our Iceland entry) deals with a country becoming more and more open after years of post-war Communist isolation and blessed with some incredible natural wonders. About half of the time is taken up following around a local motorcycle club as they putter around the rice paddies, repeatedly replace their spark plugs, and drop in on villages where everyone speaks “Old Thai.” There’s also a segment centered around the editor of a Saigon (or, as it’s officially called these days, Ho Chi Minh City) fashion magazine. The war goes almost unmentioned.

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VENEZUELA

I could have gone with any of a dozen documentaries about how Venezuela is “the worst performing economy in the world” and has all sorts of problems, but I wasn’t really in the mood for that, so instead I watched this nature documentary, which I knew was my style when, in the first couple minutes, the narrator announced “This is the story of a journey, a journey to a place, a place that has been called paradise... IN HELL!” It centers around the Venezuelan plains, where patches of jungle dot large, swampy grasslands. More birds have been seen in the area than in the US and UK combined, and many of the scenes made the birder in me mumble “I want to go to there.” The “story” (and yeah, there is one) is centered around a tortoise who is taken by some gauchos for food, escapes, and then has to find her way slowly back across the grassland to her home forest. Along the way she braves Burrowing Owls (this prairie’s weird version of prairie dogs), alligator-like Caymans, Pirahnas, herds of Capybaras, and even huge fires. But all’s well that ends well.

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VATICAN CITY

This is a slightly older National Geographic Special, complete with the old classic intro and narration by Martin Sheen (it’s from two Popes ago!) but the Vatican is one of those places where the particular decade doesn’t actually matter so much. Vatican City is, of course, by a pretty decent margin, the smallest country in the world, completely surrounded by the Italian capital of Rome, but it far from the least powerful or least visited, due to its status as the headquarters of the Catholic Church. This documentary follows a couple of “days-in-the-life” of the Vatican, visiting with art restorers, photographers, nuns, Bishops about to be ordained, recruits for the Swiss Guard (the Pope’s version of the Secret Service, except they still dress like we are in the Renaissance), and many others. We get to visit the Pope’s closet, the grave of St. Peter, a soup kitchen run by Mother Theresa’s order, the Vatican library (where there are letters from Kublai Khan and Henry VIII, both marked “Denied”), and the Pope’s closet.

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To enjoy this 3D documentary about Vanuatu, remember to wear anaglyph 3D glasses* whenever the symbol appears on your screen. Discover the South Pacific beac...

VANUATU

Of the various Pacific Island nations, Vanuatu seems to have more pockets where people are still living as they always have. Or maybe that is just the impression this tour of the islands gives? What I do know is that IT IS IN 3D YOU GUYS!!! Well, if you happen to have some spare 3D glasses sitting around for some reason. If you don’t, it doesn’t affect you one way or the other. One of the highlights is a visit to a village cult that worships a possibly fictional American World War II soldier named “John Frum” (it has been suggested that this is a shortening of “John from America”), who will supposedly return one day to bring everyone peace and prosperity. The cult members perform military-style parades with large sticks instead of guns and with “USA” painted on their chests. We also visit a village ceremony in which boys become men by bungee jumping off a tower using vines tied to their feet, though I was either less impressed or more impressed once one of them face-plants and seems fine afterwards, I’m not sure which. The host is an Australian (?) girl who is easily freaked out by things, though this is perhaps understandable when she visits the edge of an active volcano. There is some National Geographic-style nudity from the locals. If you ever wanted to see people’s butts in 3D without the ignominy of searching for 3D porn, this is your chance.

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UZBEKISTAN

This documentary was produced by the “Indian Office of External Affairs” and highlights the connections between India and the former soviet republic of Uzbekistan, both historically and in the present day. It also does some sightseeing in several different parts of Uzbekistan itself, particularly the ancient city of Samarkand. This city was seen as the heart of the Silk Road, and even in what we might consider medieval times there were strong trade connections between this area and India. Today, Samarkand has been replaced by the modern capital of Tashkent, where much of the modern world trade is centered. This was a little bit of a different angle on this sort of thing and I actually found it fairly interesting, though as a non-Indian I think it assumed background knowledge of facts and history that I don’t necessarily have.

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URUGUAY “Grannies on Safari”, which produced three seasons, is one of those random travel shows I always enjoy if I find it on my local PBS station at 10:30 on a Sunday morning. It is for the most part similar to average travel show, with the exception that it is hosted by two older African-American women who are best friends and like to go shopping for clothes. I knew that I wanted to watch a travel show on Uruguay because it’s actually a country I didn’t know that much about, except that it has produced some very good soccer players over the years. All the usual travel show beats are here, but also included are scenes with the two ladies dickering over money, making fun of each other’s hats, and visiting an organization that helps local women of color find employment. Their non-professionalism is pretty endearing, especially when it leads to lines like this: “Look at this road! It’s like there’s a canopy. But one made of trees!”

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA This feature documentary looks at the on-the-ground realities of the US political process, and I would highly recommend it for Americans and other people alike who may only really view US politics as a battle for who gets to be President. It centers around an election for Mayor in a small town in New Jersey. Three candidates run and engage in a wide variety of campaign tactics. They’re three interesting guys, though it’s really the various residents of the town who steal the show. Featured prominently are the local high school football team, Jesse Ventura’s campaign manager, a guy dressed as a giant pencil, yard signs getting stolen, a fake newspaper, and the mayor sarcastically applauding his constituents. I would most recommend this film to either people in the US who are very into American politics, who will recognize a great deal and understand just how bizarre a few things are, and at the same time I would recommend it as a good intro to the US election process on a very basic level.

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UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

To many, many people (primarily outside of the US, but not entirely), the city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates has become the world epicenter of wealth and progress. This documentary by the CBC looks into Dubai in the relatively early stages of its phenomenon, when the Burj Dubai was not yet the world’s tallest building and the huge ultra-modern Dubai airport was still under construction, but it still relevant to the modern day. It looks into both the positive and negative aspects of living in Dubai, both as a “national” (making up only around 20% of the population) or as an expat. Foreign indentured workers have built the splendors of modern-day Dubai, and, similar to the situation gaining so much attention in Qatar, they are not very well treated. Neither are women. Even a Canadian female engineer that they interview describes having to bring male co-workers to the bank or government offices in order to get them to take her seriously. The locals repeatedly try to downplay the negative aspects, but they are real. Every place has its own faults, and Dubai has certainly made a better go of modernity than almost anywhere else in the Islamic World. This film was shot in 2007, a year before the global economic crisis would slow things slightly, but Dubai is still very much on the world forefront.

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UKRAINE

“ATM Woman” is a documentary about the women from Ukraine who travel to Western Europe, away from their families, in order to earn money. They work as caregivers for the elderly, nannies, and other similar jobs. They all insist the Ukraine economy is terrible and there is no work for anyone. Back in Ukraine, many of their children are living relatively luxurious lives (aka lives that look like someone in an American suburb) with the money that’s sent back from places like Italy. But there are less jobs than there used to be and the system that’s in place may not be sustainable. Meanwhile, a generation of Ukrainian children grows up without their moms. The dads seem to be already out of the picture, which maybe is a different problem.

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The Worlds Worst Place To Be Gay 1/4

Aired on BBC 3 14th February 2011 Scott Mills travels to Uganda where the death penalty could soon be introduced for being gay. The gay Radio 1 DJ finds out ...

UGANDA

This is another one I had trouble embedding, so you’ll have to click the link. In this BBC special, a gay English DJ travels to Uganda, which is apparently one of the most homophobic nations on Earth (for a variety of reasons which the documentary explores) and meets some of the LGBT people struggling to survive there. There are funny parts, such as when he visits a witch doctor to “cure” his homosexuality in order to see what it’s like, and it turns out to involve getting a live chicken rubbed on his body, and less funny parts, such as when he meets the local legislator who recently introduced a bill to make being gay punishable by death.

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TURKMENISTAN

Basically no one has heard of this former Soviet republic in Central Asia, located north of Iran and south of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and even less people know that it’s one of the world’s most insular countries. Very few people are allowed to travel there, and those that do report that it comes off as a sort of a poor man’s North Korea, if such a thing is possible. There is a massive personality cult around the leader, who has created a beautiful capital city with crazy golden monuments to himself, surrounded by impoverished countryside. This film concentrates on the dictator who called himself Turkmenbashi (”leader of the Turkmen”) and was filmed in 2005. His whims were law and they were strange whims. He outlawed, among other things, lipsynching, beards, wearing makeup on TV, and gold fillings. Turkmenbashi died in December 2006 of an apparent heart attack, but he has since been replaced with a leadership cult around a new dictator and much of this still applies. It’s crazy stuff.

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TURKEY

This documentary from the Discovery Channel does a good job of depicting the major sights of this very interesting and complex nation at the crossroads of Asia and Europe. Highlights include Istanbul, with its huge mosques and palaces, the huge and ancient Hagia Sophia church, and its atmospheric bazaars, as well as the trip to the eastern Cappadocia region, with its incredible natural stone towers, many of which have been carved into homes by the locals. The narrator has a North American accent, but he may be an alien who is trying his best to imitate humans, since he commits some bizarre mispronunciations of fairly common words. One not-particularly-common word that is particularly amusing is his pronunciation of the Hittites, an ancient people who lived in Eastern Turkey at the dawn of civilization. Rather than “hit-tights” he says “high-titties.”