Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Shocking and informative, SPLIT: A DIVIDED AMERICA takes a behind the scenes look at the partisanship dominating our politics. Balancing candid discussions with citizens coast to coast and commentary from some of the sharpest minds analyzing government and society today, it’s a cross country investigation of democracy in America.

Susan Retik and Patti Quigley are two ordinary soccer moms living in the affluent suburbs of Boston until tragedy strikes. Rather than turning inwards, grief compels these women to focus on the country where the terrorists who took their husbands’ lives were trained: Afghanistan. Over the course of two years, as they cope with loss and struggle to raise their families as single mothers, these extraordinary women dedicate themselves to empowering Afghan widows whose lives have been ravaged by decades of war, poverty and oppression – factors they consider to be the root causes of terrorism.

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Debate Team is a documentary exploring the weird subculture of competitive college debate. Competitors battle at 360 words per minute, hauling around mountains of evidence called “cards” and nearly every debate ends in global nuclear annihilation.

In 2005, nearly 200 teams converged on San Francisco State to compete in the National Championship. The documentary follows four teams, from Michigan State, Harvard, West Georgia, and Berkeley in their quest for the national title.

What emerges is not simply a chronicle of the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, but a more disturbing examination into the nature of competition itself and the American fetish with championships and champions.

Debate Team is sponsored by Film Arts.

In March of 2004 a Pennsylvania filmmaker was activated with his National Guard unit and deployed to Iraq. During the next twelve months he would document his unique experiences as he and his platoon were tasked with the politically charged mission of searching for the infamous weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The search would take them from the heart of Baghdad to rural Iraqi farms.

Land Of Confusion offers a never-before seen account of working with the then secretive Iraq Survey Group (ISG) as they travel throughout the country searching for evidence that Saddam had the WMDs. The film reveals the extraordinary perspective of soldiers on the ground in Iraq, as recorded by one of their own and goes far beyond what the conventional mainstream media shows audiences about the war.

View the trailer: QuickTime 6 or QuickTime 7

Land of Confusion will premiere at the Florida Film Festival in Orlando in February 2008. Land of Confusion was one of 10 documentaries selected for screening out of over 300 submissions to the FFF, one of the largest film festivals in the United States.

Breath Control is a documentary about making music with nothing but the human voice. The human beat box is one of the key elements in the development of Hip Hop culture, alongside Dj-ing, Graffiti, Breakdancing, and MC-ing. Unfortunately, its contribution has been largely overlooked, as has the fun, expressive, human, and spontaneous dimension of Hip Hop that it represents. As the first documentary of its kind, Breath Control: The History of the Human Beat Box uses interviews, live performances, archival footage, and animation to bring to light this important and neglected ingredient of Hip Hop's identity.

With the help of Beat Box pioneers DOUG E. FRESH, BIZ MARKIE, and THE FAT BOYS, Breath Control traces this art form from it's basic beat beginnings in the Eighties to it's present day multi-layered, polyrhythmatic figurehead's RAHZEL and SCRATCH of the Hip Hop group THE ROOTS. But Breath Control isn't limited to Hip Hop. Musician ZAP MAMA posits that human beat boxing is an artform practiced all over the world and has been refined by many different cultures. Breath Control is a half historical, half tutorial look at humans as actual instruments.