The latest news reported in the Guardian is more horrifying still, over this past week it has been disclosed that over 240 rapes took place in a small village between 30 July and 4 August. The villagers claim that a U.N. peacekeeping force knew that rebel forces were posing a threat to the small town of Ruvungi in Walikale territory, and did nothing. The U.N. forces claim they knew nothing until a week later, in spite of the fact that they were stationed only 20 miles away. The investigation has begun, though what is also needed is a commitment that such a thing could not happen again.

Fighting the Silence offers a deeper look at what these latest events mean to the people of Ruvungi. It is a beautiful and harrowing film about rape in the Congo, and how survivors are coming together to support each other and educate their communities about its realities and how to deal with them. Through discussion groups with women and their husbands and plays for village communities they have tried to start the discussion about who is truly to blame for rape, settling it squarely on the man and never the women. There is an incredible and shocking scene with a workshop for members of the military that will stay with you long after the film is done, and highlights the struggle of women to overcome not just the trauma of rape itself, but also its stigma.

The tragedy lies even deeper than the immense pain and trauma of the rape itself, and the lifetime of physical and psychological scars that it leaves behind it. Congo continues to be an immensely traditional society, where men feel required to leave their wives after they have been raped, and husbands cannot be found for girls who survive it. It rips and tears at relationships and the fundamental ties holding community together, and many survivors cannot speak of what has happened to them; if they do they find themselves isolated. A handful of men are working alongside their women to overcome it, and this film also brings their voices to the fore.

Ultimately, Fighting the Silence bears a message of hope as women and men struggle together to end the violence, and to collectively bear the pain of what has already been inflicted. It highlights some of the grassroots efforts to overcome, efforts that should be supported by the international community.

For more on the current news, you can read a very impressive attempt to document exactly what happened in the village of Ruvungi from Congo Siasa, more reporting from the Channel 4 news blog, there’s some Q & A from the UN Press conference at Inner City Press, and the report from Amnesty International.

The rest of us cannot know what this is like, but that should not stop us from trying to understand, both the cost of such imprisonment on a human being, and the intersection of racism, corruption, and capitalism that make such a thing possible. The Guardian ran a piece this weekend trying to give a taste of this experience in King’s own words, as he says “I talk about my years in solitary as if it was the past, but the truth is it never leaves you. In some ways I am still there.”

It is a short taste only, the documentary In the Land of the Free does more to connect interviews with King to the details of the case, the history of the prison, the larger context of injustice. Film can help bring this kind of reality to life in a way few things can, and more than one person has commented on the courage of these three men’s convictions.

And there is of course, Robert’s autobiography, From the Bottom of the Heap, which opens up the experience of growing up poor and black in Louisiana in an entirely different way, and a few more stories from his book tour in Southern California.

The campaign to free the Angola 3 in ongoing, and there are many ways to get involved. For the latest updates you can follow the Angola 3 news blog, and check out the following websites: www.angola3.org, www.angola3action.org, www.a3grassroots.org, www.kingsfreelines.com, www.hermanshouse.org.

[Photograph: Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images. The Guardian]

It was not known until yesterday whether they were alive or dead. The company did not have adequate maps of the mine, so the first bore hole missed the refuge where the believed the survivors to be. It was the second bore hole that found them, allowed contact for the first time. Finally, after 17 days there is now more than a tenuous hope.

It will be four months, however, before an escape shaft will reach them. Four months trapped underground with only each other. They have created a canal of freshwater with a bulldozer, however. They have rigged up light using electricity from a truck engine. Makes me wonder what I myself could manage if I were trapped in the darkness far underground. Probably not that, but I’d hope to surprise myself. Still, I am full of respect.

I come from a mining town, if it’s not grown it’s mined people say. That’s true of your car, your computer, your refrigerator, your phone, your radio, pieces of your shoes and your clothes…the list is infinite really. So much of what we take for granted comes from a mine or an oil well, a steel making plant, factory or refinery. These are the jobs that make the refined distance of our modern world possible. More and more of them are confined to less developed countries, far from those of us who primarily benefit from the resources extracted and the brutal work of their processing. It allows us the luxury of not seeing, of not knowing the risks involved.

Workingman’s Death begins to change that. Its incredible cinematographic scope draws us deep inside a kind of work few of us in the developed world could imagine. Coal mining in the Ukraine. Gathering sulphur from an Indonesian volcano. Working steel in China. This film brings you inside the work itself, as close as you can come to an experience without physically being there. You bring your own ethics along with you, they are not provided.

Of course, the lack of ethics involved in running an unsafe mine are clear. This is only one accident in a long line of them at the San Jose Mine run by the San Esteban Mining Company. Reuters reports thirteen previous fatalities on site. This mine has also long been a site of worker struggle. But the international spotlight generated by the scale of the current tragedy has forced the Chilean government to at least verbally say that they are committed to an overhauling of mining safety regulations and inspections. We should hold them to that. After all, it is partly Chilean copper that makes our world work for us the way it does. That, and the hard physical labour of thousands of people around the world.

Brightwide will be presenting three tremendous documentaries that can each be seen on the big screen as part of the festival. Brightwide’s Executive Director Paola de Leo will also be leading a panel discussion following In the Land of the Free… on Wednesday evening, September 1st (click here to book this, or any of the films). Of course, if you don’t feel like getting out of your pajamas, you can also watch them on our site from the warm (and dry) comfort of your own home.

In the Land of the Free – Most would believe it impossible that anyone in the US could be held in solitary confinement for thirty-seven years. They would be wrong. Samuel L Jackson narrates the story of the Angola 3, extraordinary men targeted by prison authorities for becoming members of the Black Panther Party and fighting the degrading conditions, abuse, and sexual slavery rampant in America’s most infamous prison. 

La Forteresse – Long white corridors stretch, sterile. Guards patrol, kids play football on the pavement, surrounded by wire fences. La Forteresse gives us unique access to a Swiss asylum centre, those who work there, and the refugees arriving from every corner of the world to wait for their dreams of a new life to be processed. It manages to hold the two realities side by side: that of a prison, however kindly its face, and the living breathing humanity within it.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell – The men would not end Liberia’s civil war, so the women did. Christian and Muslim together braved bullets and arrest day after day to demand peace. They went on a sex strike, argued with religious leaders and politicians, and barricaded the warring factions into the negotiating room until they got peace. Their words, their courage, and their struggle will make your heart swell up with a hope and a pride in humanity that you would not have thought possible.

We’re also very happy to say that one of the festival features is a Colin Firth Retrospective; Firth is a founder of Brightwide, and a damn fine actor. Firth Among Equals, an illustrated talk on his work and films given by Phillip Kemp is on Tuesday 31st August at 14:00. And Kemp has chosen a further ten films to illustrate Firth’s career. They’re not the usual suspects either, so definitely check them out.

And the final reasons to take a jaunt down to Chichester, as if all the above were not enough? The slew of rare films under the heading Surreal Friends: Viva Mexico & Surrealist Cinema, and the Akira Kurosawa tribute. It’s going to be a brilliant 18 days in Chichester, so don’t miss it.

You want to know about Charles Taylor, warlord, and one-time president of Liberia? Watch Pray the Devil Back to Hell, hear from Liberian women themselves just how they feel about their former leader. Liberia’s first civil war began in December of 1989, when Taylor launched an armed uprising against the Liberian government. In 1997, Taylor became president. The second civil war to oust him was launched by LURD in 1999. The women tell of how the Liberian people suffered through years of hunger, fear, torture, and mass rape. They tell of how young boys were conscripted into the army, fed drugs, given guns. They tell of the moment when they joined together to say enough.

Christians and Muslims came together to demand peace. They came together every day, rain or shine, even when the bullets were flying. Theirs is an amazing story of women taking power, reclaiming a nation back from warlords, electing the first woman to be President in any African country.

And so theirs are the names that should shine. Etweda “Sugars” Cooper. Vaiba Flomo. Leymah Roberta Gbowee. Janet Johnson Bryant. Asatu Bah Kenneth. Etty Weah. And the thousands of others. Ultimately they are the ones who helped bring the peace negotiations to a close, force Taylor out of power and into exile. This is what made his extradition possible, to stand trial for war crimes in Sierra Leone and his role in trading arms for blood diamonds.

How do we know this? It has happened before.You must remember the Exxon Valdez disaster. If you watch Oil Spill, it will take you through what happened twenty years ago, and the impact it continues to have on the Alaskan sound. There’s already been a lot of speculation on how the aftereffects of this disaster might compare to that one, or to the 1979 spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  The National Wildlife Federation has an interesting chart, though already outdated.

Of course, the negative impacts of oil are even more complicated than a simple spill. The largest oil spill was not accidental at all, in fact, it came at the end of the first Gulf war and the destruction of Kuwaiti wells. Millions of tons of oil were dumped into the Persian Gulf, serving both as an act of war, and its cause. The use of oil to create energy is one of the principal sources for greenhouse gases and climate change, it is, in fact, a major focus of The Age of Stupid.

You will never forget the oil flares of Shell’s Operations in Nigeria or their impact on local communities and the land they live on. The Iraqi kids living in Lebanon, exiles of the second Gulf war (also for oil, Alan Greenspan would know, wouldn’t he?).

It certainly seems time to not just to educate ourselves and reconsider our dependence on oil, but do everything within our power to get ourselves off it as soon as we possibly can.

The Guardian has made it a major source for multiple stories since the news first broke, giving it a majority of space on the landing page and releasing detailed information and spreadsheets with the actual data. Der Spiegel has done something similar. The New York Times? Today there is one major story, “Document Leak May Hurt Efforts to Build War Support.” There is nothing about civilian, or even friendly fire, casualties here, rather a principal focus on Afghan and Pakistani unreliability.

I would disagree with the NY Times Op-Ed writer Andrew Exum that this is no big deal and we have learned nothing new. These documents offer an unparalleled view of what is happening on the ground and its true costs to everyone within Afghanistan’s borders. Of course, this immeasurable human cost is multiplied in the daily suffering of refugees.

The camps along the borders in Pakistan overflow with Afghans trapped in strange limbo, with very little hope of returning home, and less hope for any kind of future. And the true tragedy of Afghanistan is that many of these camps have been in continuous use since the 70s, and the USSR’s war in Afghanistan with all its parallels to Vietnam. Given a guerrilla was like a fish in water, to counter insurgency their strategy was to simply drain the water.

What wouldn’t any of us do to escape a world with so little chance for a future?

Well, maybe. I myself was imagining clear bridges through the London skies, carrying cyclists happily over a maze of traffic and pedestrians in something resembling those tunnels that you can build for your pet hamster. I was disappointed in the actual meaning of cycle superhighway, but I must admit that for someone of my imagination that happens a lot.

Still, Boris Johnson insists that they have done all they can to make cycling safe and fun (and ridiculously cool as only Boris can do).

I suppose clear cycling tunnels in the sky was never really an option, so painting bright blue cycle lanes and widening junctions is pretty good I guess. And you’ll be able to hire a bike in the central city…just pick them up when you need them, drop them off again when you don’t. I’ve seen the special racks going up already, and the scheme will start next Friday (July 30th).

And why is this important? Well, with global warming and all that, the world is pretty much going to hell if we don’t do something. All of us riding bikes might be a small thing compared to the importance of the big boys reducing their polluting ways, but still an important step. Watch the Age of Stupid, it might just get you on a bike right away! Otherwise, just think of the wonders it will do for your legs…

When people are bundled into numbers and crowds of statistics, it is easy to abstract them. When they are represented by nothing more than piles of file folders, each containing a paperwork of suffering, pain and loss, it is easy to treat people as though they do not matter. Even when a human being is standing before you, if they come in a long procession of horror stories that must be dealt with in a limited time, then they are easy to send home to an uncertain and possibly deadly future.

The Guardian’s most recent story by Esmé Madill brings this to life. It rescues one story from among so many, a frail and mentally ill woman trying to find a lawyer to represent her. She failed. Partly for lack of an interpreter who spoke her dialect. Partly due to the fact that the Refugee and Migrant Refugee centre was recently forced into administration, putting an even heavier burden on lawyers and organisations already struggling to support a vulnerable and poor community. There is no money in support, unlike what can be made in apprehending, incarcerating, processing, and transporting this vulnerable community.

Knowing where people are coming from can help. Knowing about the UK’s convoluted immigration system can also help. Getting involved to change things will of course help even more, just click on the Act Now tab on any of the film pages to find out more.

The officer claimed he thought he was pulling his taser and not his gun. And last week the courts convicted him of involuntary manslaughter, with a sentence of two to four years, which is less than the five-year mandatory sentence for crack possession. Arnold Schwarzenegger begged for calm, and while some didn’t listen, it is saddening that the protests weren’t bigger, riots certainly seems far too strong a word.

Perhaps people just don’t believe change is possible. The names of 2000 people killed by law enforcement in the 1990’s alone are shown below as part of the Stolen Lives project.

Extreme cases like those of Rodney King and Amadou Diallo are well known, but there are thousands of others. Amnesty International has cited the United States for multiple violations, as has Human Rights Watch. And police brutality against people of colour is intertwined with the shocking statistics on incarceration in the United States, where 2.2 million people, over one in every hundred Americans, is behind bars. One out of every 9 African American men between 20 and 34 are in prison.

From slavery to the institutional racism and lynchings of Jim Crow to the violent repression of the Civil Rights movement, there is an unbroken chain leading to today’s ugly statistics. Self protection against police brutality was one of the organizing principles of the Black Panthers, hundreds of them were incarcerated, and George Jackson and Fred Hampton among others were killed by police. Many continue as political prisoners today, Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Angola 3 among them. But they are still fighting, we can do no less.