THREE brilliant documentaries were released this year about people standing up to centres of concentrated power.
Still the Enemy Within marks the 30th anniversary of the 1984-5 miners’ strike.
Using a slew of unseen footage and fantastic interviews with miners and their families, director Owen Gower tells the gripping and moving story of the strike when, as one interviewee notes, prime minister Margaret Thatcher was “going for the throat” of the NUM.
The film ends by highlighting how the defeat of the miners changed industrial relations forever, ushering in the neoliberal capitalism that has pushed the country to breaking point today.
Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour records a very different type of resistance — that of US whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Frustrated by President Obama’s expansion of the so-called war on terror and the attendant, extensive global surveillance programmes, intelligence analyst Snowden leaked thousands of top secret National Security Agency documents in June 2013.
Poitras, along with US journalist Glenn Greenwald, was involved from the beginning, with most of the film centred on their initial meetings with Snowden in his Hong Kong hotel room. Very much a US-centric narrative, it has nevertheless huge ramifications for the rest of the world.
At one point, Snowden remarks offhandedly that Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) optic-tapping operation Tempora
 is “probably the most invasive intercept system in the world.”
Later, we see footage of GCHQ agents forcing the Guardian newspaper to destroy hard drives that contain some of the leaked documents the newspaper has been publishing.
As tense and frightening as any fictional spy thriller, what’s most worrying is that this is a true story.
While Citizenfour and Still the Enemy Within are primarily concerned with state power, the target of Cowspiracy is the power of corporations to dictate food and agricultural policy.
Focused on California, the film follows co-director Kip Andersen as he investigates why the strong link between livestock farming and climate change has been ignored by mainstream environmental organisations.bIt’s not a perfect film by any means — the contrived drama of the “hunt” might annoy some viewers — but its makers should be applauded for drawing attention to such an important, though neglected, issue.

Ian Sinclair