off grid

A feature-length documentary on how the City of London and Britain's overseas territories built a global web of offshore secrecy jurisdictions after the empire declined. It traces how this network captured and hid wealth from around the world.

A clip from the BBC series Britain from Above showing UK peak power demand. It shows a grid engineer preparing for the surge as millions put the kettle on when a popular show ends.

Geoff Lawton documents a permaculture project that turned barren Jordanian desert into green, productive land. It covers the techniques he used.

Kirsten Dirksen profiles Steve Rees, who buried two shipping containers to build an earth-cooled, off-grid 640 sq ft home in Northern California for about $30,000, solar included.

A 1984 AT&T film showing the live cutover of a Glendale, California central office from step-by-step switching to an electronic switching system. Installers prepare the site and then cut cables in a coordinated operation.

A VPRO documentary in which Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff explains her book on surveillance capitalism. It covers how Google and Facebook turn personal data into raw material for prediction and behavioral influence.

Coffeezilla recounts being offered a $20k bounty to expose a Counter-Strike skin casino, then investigates and finds a different story. It is the first episode of a series on CS skin gambling.

Official trailer for Eugene Jarecki's 2012 documentary The House I Live In, an investigative look at America's war on drugs and its effect on the criminal justice system. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

Kirsten Dirksen tours new Earthships, homes built from tires, bottles and cans that generate their own energy, collect water and grow food. The video covers the newer, cheaper Encounter model and its passive systems.

The official tour video of Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, the world's largest model railway. It shows the 1,300 square meter layout with trains, aircraft, cars and ships moving around.

Official trailer for the documentary Into Eternity, about Finland's Onkalo repository, built to store high-level nuclear waste safely for 100,000 years. It raises how to warn and communicate with far-future humans.

The official trailer for the documentary General Magic, about the secretive Apple spinoff that tried to build a handheld communicator in 1990 and whose ideas shaped the smartphone era.

The official trailer for The True Cost, a documentary on the fast fashion industry and who pays for cheap clothing. It touches on garment worker conditions and the Rana Plaza collapse.

Dominion is a two-hour documentary using drones and hidden cameras to expose conditions in animal agriculture, including food, clothing, entertainment and research. It questions humanity's dominion over animals.

Footage from the Chasing Ice project of the largest glacier calving event ever filmed, at Greenland's Ilulissat Glacier in 2008. A 75-minute event is condensed to a few minutes of cameras watching ice collapse.

An independent feature documentary in which 23 economists, advisers and financiers discuss how the financial system works and what a more just economic model might look like. It covers money creation, debt and the aftermath of the financial crisis.

A documentary about Vipassana meditation in India's Tihar Prison, led by Kiran Bedi, the prison's Inspector General. It follows inmates who went through the courses and the changes they describe.

CBC Marketplace investigates locksmith scams in the Greater Toronto Area. It exposes networks of fake Google Maps listings and fake reviews, and uses hidden cameras to show how low quotes turn into overcharges.

A Vox report on El Paquete Semanal, the weekly offline bundle of shows, music and news that is smuggled and sold in Cuba. It shows how people get media without internet access.

The 1972 documentary based on Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock, narrated by Orson Welles. It is a dystopian look at the accelerating pace of technological change and its psychological toll.

The Eames Office's 1977 film Powers of Ten starts at a picnic in Chicago and zooms out by a factor of ten every ten seconds to the edge of the universe. It then zooms inward to a proton in a carbon atom.

Coffeezilla's investigation into the Counter-Strike 2 skin gambling ecosystem, covering casino sites, influencers and esports teams that profit from it. It is part of a multi-part series on Valve's skin economy and its effects on young players.

The first episode of James Burke's Connections series, 'The Trigger Effect', explores how modern society depends on interlinked technological systems and how quickly it breaks down when they fail, starting with a power blackout.

The official Kubernetes documentary, part 1, tells how a handful of Google engineers, inspired by Docker's success, built a container orchestrator. It covers the internal resistance to open source and the competition of the container orchestrator wars.

A NOVA documentary with neuroscientist Heather Berlin exploring the subconscious and what drives our decisions. It uses sleepwalking, anesthesia, improvised rap in an MRI and game theory to probe how much of the brain's work is hidden.

A FRONTLINE documentary on whether efforts to fix plastic pollution made it worse. It looks at the battle over plastics and recycling and how little plastic is actually recycled.

A short film from Agenda Gotsch introducing syntropic agriculture and Ernst Gotsch's agroforestry methods, made for COP21. It shows degraded land regenerated into productive forest farms.

Tantacrul's 76-minute deep dive into the history of western music notation and the many proposed replacements, such as piano rolls, colored notes and the jubilate. He explains why none have displaced the current system.

A New York Times Opinion documentary tracing Soviet and KGB disinformation, from the 1980s AIDS origin hoax to modern campaigns like Pizzagate. It features former KGB officers and the people who tried to counter the lies.

LEMMiNO's 25-minute documentary on the 2014 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. It walks through the official investigation's findings and the leading theories, including satellite data and hydrophone recordings.

A Ukrainian documentary about the liquidators who cleaned radioactive debris off the Chernobyl reactor roof in two-minute shifts. It presents their firsthand accounts and footage of the work.

Part one of a 1996 BBC Modern Times documentary on the training to become a London black cab driver. It follows candidates learning the Knowledge and facing stressful repeated exams with Public Carriage Office examiners.

Brian Springer's documentary Spin, built entirely from unauthorized satellite feeds of politicians and newscasters before they went on air during the 1992 US presidential election. It exposes the behind-the-scenes construction of media reality.

A Wendover Productions documentary-style video on how Zipline delivers blood and medical supplies by drone in Rwanda. It covers the catapult launch, parachute drop and the logistics behind it.

A Motherboard documentary episode from Nebraska about farmers and mechanics fighting manufacturers like John Deere over access to the diagnostic software needed to repair modern tractors. It shows how software locks have taken away farmers' traditional self-reliance.

Cathode Ray Dude covers two bizarre HP 'Quick Start' features: QuickLook, an offline email client built on EFI firmware, and Daystarter, which hijacks the Windows boot process. It includes an explanation of EFI applications and why HP built these things.

Richard Ankrom's account of his 2001 guerrilla project, in which he painted and installed a missing freeway exit sign on a Pasadena freeway. The sign matched official standards and stayed up for years before being discovered.

TechAltar's history of Philips, once Europe's largest tech company and a world leader in lighting, radio and physical media. It traces how the company sold off or spun out its businesses, until little remains but the licensed name.

Reason TV profiles Elvis Summers, a Los Angeles musician who crowdfunded dozens of tiny homes for homeless people. City officials moved to remove them while pushing a multibillion-dollar housing plan.

A 47-minute documentary on Allan Savory and how he used Holistic Management to restore degraded land in Zimbabwe. It covers rotational grazing, soil health and regenerative agriculture.