Translated by Vrouwen voor Vrijeid (Women for Freedom)
This Dutch documentary attempts to pinpoint the main corporations and individuals responsible for the Covid plandemic.
It begins by examining the key institutional investors that own the vast majority of the global share market. Going company by company, filmmakers reveal that approximately 8-10 institutional investors own 80% of the stock of nearly all global corporations. Some of the smaller institutional investors include mutual and pension funds. However the top three of every corporation they examine include BlackRock* and the Vanguard Group.**
The film looks at the institutional shareholdings of company after company, including Google, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Phillips, Boeing, Airbus, Coca Cola, Pepsi, all the mining companies, all the oil companies, Cargill, ADM, Bayer (the largest seed producer in the world since their acquisition of Monsanto), all the textile and fashion brands, Amazon, Ebay, Master Card, Visa, Paypal, and all the banks, tobacco companies, defense contractors, insurance companies, processed food companies, cosmetic brands and publishers and media outlets.***
In every case, both Vanguard Group and BlackRock are both within the top three institutional investors.
They also own stock in each other’s companies. In fact, Vanguard is the biggest shareholder in BlackRock, which Bloomberg refers to as the “fourth branch of government” because it both advises central banks and lends them money.
We don’t know exactly who owns shares in Vanguard as it’s not a publicly traded company. However we do know that it’s a safe place for many of the most powerful families in the world to hide their wealth (eg the Rockefellers, Rothschilds and British royal family).
The film also explores how wealthy families use nonprofit foundations to shape global politics in their own interest without attracting public attention. The big three featured in the film are George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the Clinton Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
All these rich and powerful elites meet at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland every January and mingle with world leaders and significant non-profit groups, such as Greenpeace and UNESCO.
Chairman and founder of the WEF is Klaus Schwab, a Swiss professor and businessman. In his book, The Great Reset, he states that the coronavirus is a great “opportunity” to reset our societies. According, to Schwab, our old society must switch to a new one because the consumption society the elite has forced on us is no longer sustainable. Under the new society he proposes, people will own nothing and rely primarily on the state to get their needs met.
*BlackRock, Inc. is an American multinational investment management corporation based in New York City. Founded in 1988, initially as a risk management and fixed income institutional asset manager, BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with $8.67 trillion in assets under management as of January 2021.
**The Vanguard Group, Inc. is an American registered investment advisor based in Malvern, Pennsylvania with about $7 trillion in global assets under management, as of January 13, 2021. It is the largest provider of mutual funds and the second-largest provider of exchange-traded funds in the world after BlackRock’s iShares.
***What this means, In essence, is that a handful of individuals control all public information.
Bong Joon-ho has always been interested in the mechanics of genre cinema. The South Korean director has made a career of subverting established genres in an intelligent, meaningful manner. In The Host and Okja, he took the creature feature and added socio-political subtext to it. The serial killer thriller, Memories of Murder, highlighted police incompetence in South Korea and the Hitchcockian murder mystery, Mother, revealed the cultural divide between men and women in Korean society.
Fortunes change when Ki-woo falsifies his credentials to land a tutoring job with a wealthy couple, Mr Park (Lee Sun-kyun) and his gullible wife Yeon-kyo (Cho Yeo-jeong). While he teaches their daughter Da-hye (Jung Ziso), he learns that their troublesome son Da-song (Jung Hyeon-jun) also needs help improving his drawing skills. Ever the opportunist, he recommends his sister — not revealing her real identity of course. She recommends her father as a driver after getting the previous one fired by setting him up as a sex fiend. Ki-taek then recommends his wife to take over as housekeeper after a scheme involving the most creative use of peaches since Call Me By Your Name. After their clandestine infiltration operation into the Parks’ lives is complete, the story makes so many intense and unexpected twists and turns, it turns into a whole different beast altogether.
The cast of Parasite deliver performances of exceptional psychological acuity and perverse frivolity. Led by Bong’s frequent collaborator Song Kang-ho, they are sure to conjure the loudest of laughs and the strongest of emotional reactions from their audiences.
Bong brilliantly uses the upstairs-downstairs distinction in the Parks’ house to reveal a socially divided society. And the society is not just divided by wealth but also culture. Bong revisits a familiar theme of the proliferation of American values over traditional Korean ones. The Parks are a Westernised family who live in a sleek, modernist home with white picket fences — and who buy toys and gadgets from the US, exemplifing the upper crust. Ki-taek’s family, meanwhile, lives in a sordid apartment in the basement, where cockroaches thrive and drunkards urinate on their windows. So, with Parasite, Bong tries to bring to light this deep, festering malady at the heart of Korean society.
Parasite offers a cleverly paced, thoroughly entertaining blend of sumptuous visuals and wickedly dark humour. The music too makes the plot twists and revelations hit that much harder.
Despite the cultural and language barriers, Parasite is an unforgettable cinematic experience as it speaks to universal ideas, themes and emotions. If Bong Joon-ho’s style of genre filmmaking hasn’t become an adjective already, it sure is time now.
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy lingers as one of the most traumatic events of the twentieth century. The open and shut nature of the investigation which ensued left many global citizens unsettled and dissatisfied, and nagging questions concerning the truth behind the events of that fateful day remain to this day. Evidence of this can be found in the endless volumes of conspiracy-based materials which have attempted to unravel and capitalize on the greatest murder mystery in American history.
Now, a hugely ambitious documentary titled Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick adds fuel to those embers of uncertainty, and points to many potential culprits whose possible involvement in the assassination has long been obscured by official historical record.
Authoritatively written and narrated by Francis Richard Conolly, the film begins its labyrinthine tale during the era of World War I, when the wealthiest and most powerful figures of industry discovered the immense profits to be had from a landscape of ongoing military conflict. The film presents a persuasive and exhaustively researched argument that these towering figures formed a secret society by which they could orchestrate or manipulate war-mongering policies to their advantage on a global scale, and maintain complete anonymity in their actions from an unsuspecting public. Conolly contends that these sinister puppet masters have functioned and thrived throughout history – from the formation of Nazism to the build-up and aftermath of September 11.
The election of President Kennedy in 1960 represented a formidable threat to these shadowy structures of power, including high-profile figures within the Mafia, crooked politicians, and the world’s most influential and notorious war profiteers. Thus, a plot was hatched which would end Kennedy’s reign prior to any chance of re-election, thereby restoring the order and freedoms of these secret societies.
At nearly three and a half hours, Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick examines a defining event of our times from a perspective not often explored. While it may or may not win over viewers who remain skeptical of mass-scale conspiracy, it presents its findings in a measured and meticulous manner which demands attention and consideration.
People put their faith in the strangest things. Some feel their god will return to cast down judgment on humankind. Others are certain beings from another solar system planted genetic material on Earth to create life. And some believe, or perhaps not, that a flying spaghetti monster lives in the sky. Here’s another one: Folk music history tells us a train called the Southern Pacific Golden Gate Limited ran near Sugar Land prison in Texas, where legendary Blues man Lead Belly heard it passing. He and other inmates believed the train represented some sign of hope that soon they would be set free. Lead Belly later popularized a song about it, called “Midnight Special”, featuring a lyric in which he asks the train to “shine a light on me”. Apart from memorable covers by Harry Belafonte, Bob Dylan, and Credence Clearwater Revival, Lead Belly’s folk song informs the title of writer-director Jeff Nichols’ fourth film, Midnight Special.
People in the film believe some strange things, too. Some of them believe a young boy will grant their way to salvation, while the government believes that same boy is a threat to national security. But more on the specifics later. These belief systems pervade Nichols’ screenplay, a slow-burner infused with soulful character depth and science-fiction underpinnings. Midnight Special has much in common with Nichols’ excellent Take Shelter (2011), about a working-class family plagued by the father’s apocalyptic premonitions. That otherwise grassroots, southern-fried suspenser contains fantastical elements, though really it’s about the extremes people will go to chase what they believe. Nichols has explored similar American spirituality in his other two films, Shotgun Stories (2007) and Mud (2011). Each of his films demonstrates the potential danger inherent to blindly following our beliefs and convictions.
Nichols’ calculated opening demands the audience take time to figure out what’s happening and why, who the good guys are, and in the end, what just came to pass. It’s a picture audiences must feel their way through in the best possible way. An Amber Alert blares across the television screen, a reporter notifying us a young boy named Alton has been kidnapped by a man named Roy. As the shot pulls back, we find ourselves in a motel room with Roy (Michael Shannon, severe as ever) and Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), who, behind an ever-present pair of swimming goggles, reads a comic book by flashlight. Also in the room is a crew-cut man of action, Lucas (Joel Edgerton). They’re waiting until the sun goes down to continue their getaway. Lucas drives fast and without headlights, wearing night vision headgear to see the highway in the pitch dark.
Nichols cross-cuts to things at “The Ranch”—a Texas compound not unlike David Koresh’s Branch Davidians—populated by old-world types in hand-sewn garb. They’re led by a quietly intense organizer named Calvin (Sam Shepard), who wants Alton returned to him. The FBI raids The Ranch and puts everyone on buses to a secure location. They ask questions about Calvin’s people buying guns and about Alton’s kidnapping. A bookish NSA specialist named Sevier (Adam Driver) wants to know about Alton, who came in contact with him, and what they know about the boy’s abilities. And so we must wonder, why so many questions about this boy? The answer: When Alton is exposed to the sun, beams of light shoot from his eyes; he seems to speak in tongues; he can give people visions; in space, satellites meant to detect nuclear explosions spy an energy source emitting from him; he also picks up radio signals in his head.
But what is he? Nichols never answers that question outright. Over time, we learn Roy is Alton’s father, and Lucas is Roy’s friend, and together they’re protecting Alton from The Ranch and the government. All parties concerned feel a great power exists inside the boy and, though they don’t completely understand it, they fearfully pursue and defend him. Soon Alton’s mother (Kirsten Dunst) joins Roy and Lucas, aware of the entire plan. We learn all of Alton’s peculiarities have a hidden encryption, coordinates that point to a certain spot on a specific day. Everything depends on getting him there on time. And gradually, as men from The Ranch get closer to recapturing Alton, and the government goons track down their perceived threat, we get a greater—but not clearer—sense of what might occur if and when Alton arrives at his destination.
Rather than frustrating, that lack of transparency is engrossing, as Nichols drops hints here and there, while he binds us to the often moving, unquestionably engaging proceedings through subtle character work. So what is Alton? He finds great interest reading a Superman comic, so perhaps he’s something like Superman, a powerful alien. Perhaps he’s a messiah sent to protect people at The Ranch. Maybe he’s an advanced form of human with mutant powers, a time traveler, a living weapon, or an inter-dimensional being. Whatever the answer, it’s less important than the real-life descriptions of the humans on Nichols’ journey. His actors carry impressive weight and gravitas, particularly Shannon, who has appeared in each of Nichols’ films. But the entire cast brings substance to their performances, involving the audience in the tense, measured development of the story.
Both narratively and technically, Nichols has used the films of Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter to inform Midnight Special, but not in such a way that it feels distractingly derivative. From the perspective that the film operates as a road movie driving toward some manner of grandiose sci-fi conclusion, the film feels like Close Encounters of the Third Kind; the ending, too, resembles Spielberg’s wondrous 1977 effort. Elsewhere, Starman (1984) comes into play, as everyone who meets Alton gravitates to his kindness, soulful sureness, and power, just as everyone in Carpenter’s film found Jeff Bridges’ alien character a kind of angelic figure. Even the ending seems to combine the finales of these two films, with a touch of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. The film also bears some similarity to Tomorrowland, although the association is undoubtedly unintentional. All the while, Adam Stone’s textured 35mm lensing captures familiar lens flares and widescreen compositions from Carpenter and Spielberg that influenced Nichols.
Questions about what happens in its marvelous climactic scenes aside, Midnight Special shines a light on the audience by offering a unique combination of the realistic and out-of-this-world. Nichols develops thoroughly dimensional characters, even among the not-irredeemable “villains” of the story. The director cares about Roy’s heavy brow and Sevier’s sense of unsure awe; with them, he develops intimate moments that effectively resonate further than the sci-fi gimmick. He never overplays the drama, such as a scene in which Alton tells his father not to worry about him. Roy replies, “I like worrying about you.” The understatedness of Nichols’ drama, the poignancy, renders a picture about how people react to what they believe or do not understand. Some embrace it; some fear it. No matter the reaction, Nichols finds a way to represent that through an engaging metaphor in his profoundly affecting and, in many ways extraordinary thriller.
Blood of the Condor (Quechua: Yawar Mallku, Spanish: Sangre de cóndor) is a 1969 Bolivian drama film co-written and directed by Jorge Sanjinés and starring Marcelino Yanahuaya. The film tells the story of an indigenous Bolivian community receiving medical care from the Peace Corps-like United States-backed agency Cuerpo del Progreso (“Progress Corps”) which is secretly sterilising local women. The story, which was based on accounts by the indigenous people to the filmmaker, provoked an outrage in the public which led to a government investigation about the Peace Corps’ actions in Bolivia, which ended in the expulsion of the agency from the country.
“Punk: Attitude” (2005) is a documentary tracing the roots, meaning and enduring influence of the punk movement of the late 70s and early 80s. Directed by Don Letts, the film offers an insider’s perspective because Letts was a catalyzing agent for the developing London punk scene, having run a clothing store called Acme Attractions and hosted parties as a reggae DJ, both often frequented by band members of groups such as The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Pretenders. Letts later managed The Slits and began his film career as a director of Clash music videos.
Punk: Attitude also features interviews with artists directly and indirectly involved with the early punk scene including Wayne Kramer (The MC5), Mick Jones (The Clash), Jello Biafra (The Dead Kennedys), Chrissie Hynde (The Pretenders), and David Johansen (The New York Dolls) among many others. Though some punk fans may dispute the relevance of certain featured musicians or feel others were overlooked, the film provide a candid, fairly comprehensive and at times contradictory overview of punk rock as iconoclastic, raw and diverse as the music itself.
After the Crash 