At the end of 2002 Ethiopia faced yet another devastating famine, despite a booming worldwide coffee industry, worth in excess of $80 billion, Ethiopian coffee farmers were facing bankruptcy, extreme poverty and starvation. The Francis brothers spent two and half years following Fair Trade coffee representative, Meskela on his worldwide travels to secure buyers for his co-operative's coffee at a fair price. Black Gold is an affecting, galvanizing and deeply informative documentary without becomi find out more...

A lovingly created homage to the melodramas of the 1950s sees Frank and Cathy Whitaker's picture perfect marriage masking a relationship based on lies. A blossoming friendship with the black gardener and a husband whose fallen in love with another man leave Cathy shunned by her friends and neighbours, her outwardly idylic world finally revealed for the sham that it is. Far from Heaven looks stunning, the recreation of the period nothing short of immaculate, but I have never been a fan of 1950s m find out more...

Bobby Sands was the IRA member who led the 1981 Long Kesh hunger strike as part of a campaign to achieve the status of political prisoners and not that of criminals. The first section of film deals with daily prison life, the 'dirty' protest and the violence, the second is a long discussion on the meaning of life with a sympathetic priest and the third depicts the last weeks and death of a man voluntarily dying of starvation. find out more...

An intelligent, thoughtful, highly engaging biopic of Harvey Milk, the San Francisco based idealist, who became the first openly gay activist to run for political office in the US. Before his assassination Milk was a leading cog in the battle for civil rights for the gay community, as in the 1978 fight against Proposition 6, which could have banned gay and lesbian individuals from teaching in schools. The story may have been a terriby tragedy, but the tone of the movie is upbeat and vibrant, Gus find out more...

A wonderful tale of a girl's passage from childhood to adulthood, a time that coincided with the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and his replacement by the tyranny of a fundamentalist theocracy. find out more...

A gripping, Oscar nominated, reconstruction of the rise of the Baader-Meinhof Group, a bunch of radical terrorists who rose in the mid-70s using military means, arson, bank raids, assassinations and kidnappings, to attempt the overthrow of the German state, many of whose personnel had their roots in the country's Nazi state. find out more...

This honest and affecting documentary uses news reports, archival footage and talking heads to describe the politics of the gay rights movement surrounding the election and assassination of openly homosexual San Franciscan councillor Harvey Milk. The movie concentrates on the emergence of a gay political movement within the electoral system, the 1978 fight against Proposition 6, which would have banned gay and lesbian individuals from teaching in schools, and the scandalously low sentence given find out more...