The Power of Nightmares
Examines how politicians have used our fears to increase their power and control over society.
Adam Curtis
Adam Curtis
Casts & Crew
Gilles Kepel
Melvin Goodman
Stephen Holmes
William Kristol
Michael Ledeen
Richard Perle
Azzam Tamimi
Fouad Allam
Abdullah Anas
Milton Bearden
Vincent Cannistraro
Anne Cahn
Ali Haroun
Richard Pipes
Stanley Rosen
Jack Wheeler
Leo Strauss
Vladimir Pozner
John Kerry
John Ashcroft
Paula Jones
Also Directed by Adam Curtis
25 Million Pounds details the collapse of Barings Bank in the mid 1990s primarily by a broker called Nick Leeson, who lost £827 million ($1.3 billion) by speculating on futures contracts. The film contextualises the downfall as the history of Barings Bank was one of the oldest and most prestigious merchant banks in Britain, run by the same family for decades with extensive ties to Britain's elites. But in the late 19th century Barings almost went bankrupt after investing heavily in South American bonds, including backing the construction of a sewer system in Buenos Aires. The bank was saved by The Bank of England, but Edward Baring, the head of the bank, was financially ruined and never recovered.
Screened during the third episode of the fourth series of Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe.
The story of America's rise to power starting in 1959, it uses nothing but archive footage and America pop music. Showing the consequences on the rest of the world and in peoples mind.
An experimental documentary that explores Saudi Arabia's relationship with the U.S. and the role this has played in the war in Afghanistan.
The documentary set out to investigate, not the well-chronicled social problems of 1960s council housing, but the origins of how they came to be built so poorly that thousands later needed to be demolished.
Pandora's Box, subtitled "A fable from the age of science", is a six-part 1992 BBC documentary television series written and produced by Adam Curtis, which examines the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism. The episodes deal, in order, with communism in The Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, economy in the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, Kwame Nkrumah's leadership in Ghana during the 1950s and 1960s and the history of nuclear power.
In 1951, a woman died in Baltimore, U.S.A. She was called Henrietta Lacks. These are cells from her body. They were taken from her just before she died. They have been growing and multiplying ever since. There are now billions of these cells in laboratories around the world. If massed together, they would weigh 400 times her original weight. These cells have transformed modern medicine, but they also became caught up in the politics of our age.
Screen during the fourth episode of the second series of Charlie Brooker's Newswipe.
We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. They do not care. We say we care, but we do nothing, and nothing ever changes. It is normal. Welcome to the post-truth world. How we got to where we are now…
This new series of films tells the story of how we got to the strange days we are now experiencing. And why both those in power - and we - find it so difficult to move on. The films trace different forces across the world that have led to now, not just in the West, but in China and Russia as well. It covers a wide range - including the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, the history of China, opium and opiods, the history of Artificial Intelligence, melancholy over the loss of empire and, love and power. And explores whether modern culture, despite its radicalism, is really just part of the new system of power.