Media Education Foundation

Pride Denied tells the story of how corporate sponsors coopted the concept of LGBTQ pride, turning it into a feel-good brand and blunting its radical political edge. The film locates the origins of pride in sites of grassroots resistance and revolt, going back to the anti-police Stonewall uprising led by queer and trans people of color in 1969. It then traces how the deeply political roots of pride morphed into the depoliticized big-business PRIDE™...

In this interview conducted shortly before his death in 2014, Stuart Hall, one of the seminal figures in cultural studies, talks about his classic work Policing the Crisis, describes the political, symbolic, and material concerns that animated cultural studies in the 1970s, and offers a critical assessment of the field today. He then turns his attention to the always shifting terrain of race and identity in the United States and Britain, offering...

While the social construction of femininity has been widely examined, the dominant role of masculinity has until recently remained largely invisible. Tough Guise is the first educational video to systematically examine the relationship between pop-cultural imagery and the social construction of masculine identities in the U.S. at the dawn of the 21st century. In this innovative and wide-ranging analysis, Jackson Katz argues that widespread violence...

In 1937, the science fiction writer H. G. Wells imagined a “World Brain” containing all of the world’s knowledge, accessible to all people, that would be “so compact in its material form and so gigantic in its scope and possible influence” that it could transcend even nation states and governments. Seventy years later, Google set about realizing Wells’ vision, launching a massive project to scan millions of books from university library...

In this highly anticipated sequel to his groundbreaking "Advertising & the End of the World," media scholar Sut Jhally explores the devastating personal and environmental fallout from advertising, commercial culture, and rampant American consumerism. Ranging from the emergence of the modern advertising industry in the early 20th century to the full-scale commercialization of the culture today, Jhally identifies one consistent message running throughout...

Presents the determined voices of those within the military and across the political spectrum who advocate for breaking America’s addiction to fossil fuels as essential to improving our national security. Featuring high-level active duty and retired military leaders, elected officials and others, the film illustrates a tale of energy innovation. Some of our country’s most vital consumer technologies emerged out of military needs, such as the Internet...

This documentary picks up where "Further Off the Straight and Narrow" left off in 2006. How did the rise of LGBTQ visibility, political progress, and digital technologies in the 2000s come together to offer the abundance of complex queer and transgender representations we see today? The streaming services Netflix and Amazon Prime attracted audiences’ attention with nuanced and intersectional queer and trans narratives when they debuted the original...

If you’ve seen "Top Gun" or "Transformers," you may have wondered: Does all of that military machinery on screen come with strings attached? Does the military actually get a crack at the script? With the release of a vast new trove of internal government documents, the answers have come into sharp focus: the US military has exercised editorial control over thousands of films and television programs. Propelled into a field trip across America, media...

An award-winning documentary play that explores one of the most contentious periods in American political history. Filmed live on stage, THE DRAFT tells the story of the Vietnam War era through the real-life stories of 10 young Americans — eight men and two women — whose lives were shaped and forever changed by the military draft. Dramatically enhanced by archival photos, film Filmclips, and music, the play chronicles the choices these ten individuals...

HEALING FROM HATE provides a riveting inside look at the bold work of the group Life After Hate – an organization founded by former skinheads and neo-Nazis who have dedicated themselves to transforming racist, white-supremacist attitudes. The film places special emphasis on Life After Hate’s explicit engagement with issues of masculinity, giving voice to white men who say the primary reason they turned to hate groups was to validate their sense...