Seven activist documentaries available for free

These films primarily focus on immigration politics, migrant labour, indigenous organizing, and extractive economies in the U.S. and Central America.

Abla Kandalaft / Mydylarama*

The UCLA Film Archive just announced that 7 activist documentaries that are now freely available to access and stream for students, academics, and others. This update was shared through the Radical Film Network, thanks to Pr John T. Caldwell.

He writes: “This online collection is from a recent retrospective of my films that the UCLA Archive featured at the LA Hammer Museum last Fall. Now, all of these experimental documentaries and ethnographic films (made between 1983 and 2020) are available freely for classroom, area studies, or community use at the Film Archive’s public Vimeo site.”

These films primarily focus on immigration politics, migrant labour, indigenous organizing, and extractive economies in the U.S. and Central America.

The films deal with themes like ICE deportations, indigenous “migrant camps” and labour organising, as well as “reverse immigration” away from the “fortress America” U.S. of the late 1980s (“Freak street: the migratory patterns of hippies”, 1989); labour organizing by a local SoCal union community that broke the transnational corporate extraction economy of Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto (“Boron lockout”, 2012); the national economic erasure of indigenous practices and identities (the Managalase Communities of Papua New Guinea in “Kuije Kanan”, 1984); and, an unfortunate precursor to the current political theatre and staged media “war” against Venezuelan “drug cartels” in 2025 (i.e., the Reagan-Contra war against the Sandinistas, that exploited the indigenous Afro-Caribbean Miskitu people from Nicaragua depicted in “Personas desplazadas”, 1983).”