The Cost Of Convenience (2024)

Final Warning

Host Grant Jeffrey discusses how technology and government activities are changing the way our information is handled. How is this shaping our lives?

LIKE

LIKE is an IndieFlix Original documentary that explores the impact of social media on our lives and the effects of technology on the brain. The goal of the film is to inspire us to self-regulate. Social media is a tool and social platforms are a place to connect, share, and care … but is that what's really happening?

The Lie Detector

In the first decades of the 20th century, when life was being transformed by scientific innovations, researchers made a thrilling new claim: they could tell whether someone was lying by using a machine. Popularly known as the “lie detector,” the device transformed police work, seized headlines and was extolled in movies, TV and comics as an infallible crime-fighting tool. Husbands and wives tested each other’s fidelity. Corporations routinely tested employees’ honesty and government workers were tested for loyalty and “morals.” But the promise of the polygraph turned dark, and the lie detector too often became an apparatus of fear and intimidation. Written and directed by Rob Rapley and executive produced by Cameo George, The Lie Detector is a tale of good intentions, twisted morals and unintended consequences.

Behind Your Radio Dial

Familiar radio voice Ben Grauer leads the viewer on a behind the scenes tour of the National Broadcasting Company studios -- both radio and television -- in Rockefeller Center and Hollywood. The original 25-minute film previewed by network execs and affiliates in the fall of 1948 was cut down to 20 minutes before its first broadcast, reportedly to excise high-profile stars and programs such as Amos 'n' Andy, Jack Benny, and Edgar Bergen that had since left NBC for other networks.

Eco-Hack!

Conservation biologist Tim Shields sees urgency in the field and finds that traditional conservation practices are lacking when it comes to saving desert tortoise populations from ravens. He goes rogue, employing an arsenal of lasers, exploding model turtles, drones and desert rovers as a means of protecting the tortoise's dwindling numbers.

DSKNECTD

As clichés go, in 1999 the World as we knew it was about to change - and we'd been expecting it. Since childhood we'd been promised that the 21st century would bring us dramatic new technologies like flying cars and Utopian cities. Instead it bought us the smart-phone, social media, and virtual societies. And as it turns out these technologies began to transform society almost as dramatically as the moon colonies we'd been expecting. Now over a decade into the revolution, 'DSKNECTD' explores how digital communication technology is profoundly changing the way we interact and experience each other - for the good and for the bad.

Nokia Mobile: We Were Connecting People

Once upon a time there was a large Finnish company called Nokia that manufactured the world’s best and most innovative mobile phones. Nokia’s annual budget was larger than that of the Government of Finland and their phones spread everywhere and changed the whole culture of communication. But then something changed. Film portrays the rise and fall of Nokia and the Finnish mobile phone industry. Nokia engineers, designers and managers tell their story about the creation, success and downfall of the Finnish mobile phone.

Testerep

A team of scientists search for the lost island of Testerep in front of the Belgian coast, venturing into artificial landscapes and virtual realities.

Digital Amnesia

Focusing on the vulnerability of digital data, Digital Amnesia ponders the sustainability of modern artifacts that have no material state. Notable archivists share their perspectives on the Digital Age and whether it poses great promise or threat to the longevity of digital information and our collective memory.

Nothing to Hide

NOTHING TO HIDE is an independent documentary dealing with surveillance and its acceptance by the general public through the "I have nothing to hide" argument. The documentary was produced and directed by a pair of Berlin-based journalists, Mihaela Gladovic and Marc Meillassoux. It was crowdfunded by over 400 backers. NOTHING TO HIDE questions the growing, puzzling and passive public acceptance of massive corporate and governmental incursions into individual and group privacy and rights. After the emotion initially triggered by the Snowden revelations, it seems that the general public has finally accepted to live in a monitored digital world.

Revolution OS

REVOLUTION OS tells the inside story of the hackers who rebelled against the proprietary software model and Microsoft to create GNU/Linux and the Open Source movement.

Koyaanisqatsi

Takes us to locations all around the US and shows us the heavy toll that modern technology is having on humans and the earth. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and the exceptional music by Philip Glass.

The Social Dilemma

This documentary-drama hybrid explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations.

Cyborgs Among Us

In a few years, technology will merge with our bodies in ways that today seem unimaginable, and will redefine the limits of what is a human being. There are already people who, driven by the desire to experiment, have crossed the biological limits by introducing electronic devices that provide them with capabilities that go beyond what is "normal." They are the first hybrids, and they face the reaction of society, which goes from malignancy to enthusiasm. Today they are only a small minority, and many people consider them as disrupted experimenters, but in the near future we may recognize them as pioneers.

Doty

Richard Doty is a former Air Force Intelligence operative whose job at Kirtland AFB in New Mexico involved creating and disseminating disinformation about the existence of extraterrestrial spacecraft to UFO researchers. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Kirtland AFB was home to a wide range of highly classified technology experiments involving lasers, stealth aircraft, and nuclear weapons. Strange phenomena in the skies above the base piqued the interest of amateur and professional UFO investigators. Doty’s job was to recruit UFO researchers to be informants to the Air Force about goings-on in the UFO community and to spread military disinformation about UFOs among their peers. To accomplish this, Doty supplied fake documents to UFO investigators purporting to tell the “truth” about government involvement with extraterrestrials.

More Human Than Human

Stephen Hawking has warned that the creation of powerful artificial intelligence will be “either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity”. Inspired by Brian Christian’s study The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive, the filmmakers set out on an international investigation highlighting the effects of AI - scenes from our daily lives destructive and constructive.

Erasing David

David Bond lives in one of the most intrusive surveillance states in the world. He decides to find out how much private companies and the government know about him by putting himself under surveillance and attempting to disappear, a decision that changes his life forever. Leaving his pregnant wife and young child behind, he is tracked across the database state on a chilling journey that forces him to contemplate the meaning of privacy and the loss of it.

Big Brother: A World Under Surveillance

Under the pretext of fighting terrorism or crime, the major powers have embarked on a dangerous race for surveillance technologies. Facial recognition cameras, emotion detectors, citizen rating systems, autonomous drones… A security obsession that in some countries is giving rise to a new form of political regime: numerical totalitarianism. Orwell's nightmare.

The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin

A documentary about the development and spread of the virtual currency called Bitcoin.

Do You Trust this Computer?

Science fiction has long anticipated the rise of machine intelligence, and today a new generation of self-learning computers has begun to reshape every aspect of our lives. Will A.I. usher in an age of unprecedented potential, or prove to be our final invention?

Lyon-Turin : Le Dernier Tunnel XXL

Plot unavailable

General Magic

A tale of how the great vision and epic failure of General Magic, the "greatest dead company in Silicon Valley", changed the lives of billions.

Something Ventured

Apple. Intel. Genentech. Atari. Google. Cisco. Stratospheric successes with high stakes all around. Behind some of the world's most revolutionary companies are a handful of men who (through timing, foresight, a keen ability to size up other people, and a lot of luck) saw opportunity where others did not: these are the original venture capitalists. All were backing and building companies before the term 'venture capital' had been coined: companies that led to the birth of biotechnology and the spectacular growth in microprocessors, personal computers and the web. SOMETHING VENTURED uncovers the ups and downs of the building of some of the greatest companies of the twentieth century, and the hidden dramas behind some of the most famous names in business.

The Truth About Killer Robots

Exploring provocative viewpoints from engineers, factory workers, journalists, philosophers and Asimov himself, The Truth About Killer Robots is a cautionary tale about a world automating beyond control.

Satan's System 666

Terry Cook cuts through the camouflage of confusion that has been created to "cover up" the intended crime of the century. What crime? The pre-meditated madness to identify every man, woman and child with the Mark Of The Beast. This insidious Satanic System is what Biblical prophesy refers to with the number 666.

Dreams Rewired

Tracing anxieties about technology back to the 1880s, DREAMS REWIRED combines clips from nearly 200 films and newsreels with an insightful commentary by Tilda Swinton on our eternal love/hate relationship with a hyper-mediated world.

AI Evolution

Take a journey through the ever-changing landscape of artificial intelligence with this doc exploring the challenges and opportunities ahead.

E-Life

Computers, smart phones, and tablets are now a part of our daily lives. They have revolutionised the way we work, the way we communicate and the way we view the world. But what happens to our old phone when we upgrade? Where does our broken computer go after we throw it out? 'e-Life' explores what happens to our electrical goods when we throw them away and exposes some unpleasant (and perhaps unknown) truths about the detrimental affects e-waste has on people's health, the environment and the economy. From consumers in the UK to the recyclers in the dumps of Ghana, the documentary will follow the journey of our e-waste. We will examine current manufacturing and disposal processes and also assess the burden the boom in electronic goods is placing on global resources. 'e-Life' will be an objective portrayal of the problem of e-waste that documents the issue through carefully crafted cinematography.

Peep Culture

Pop culture has become “Peep Culture”, where we’ve traded privacy for notoriety and, in the process, reinvented mass culture. But what does it all mean and how is it changing us? Hal Niedzviecki, a 38 year old husband and father, plunges into “deep peep”, with webcams exposing his every move and millions of potential internet viewers invited to watch and engage in the spectacle.

The Cable That Changed the World

The first transatlantic communications cable, traversing the ocean floor from Valentia Island, County Kerry, to Newfoundland, Canada, 165 years ago was an 8 year endeavor that helped lay the foundation of the modern technology industry and explains the fragility of undersea cables today.

Vide-Uhhh!

Produced using a VHS VCR and a digital camcorder, Vide-Uhhh! is an experimental piece, showcasing the VCR recording itself as Jesse England takes it apart, messes with key components and even attempts to break it.

Total Trust

By exploring the relationship between the watched and the watching, our film uncovers the trauma and hope engendered by the Chinese all-surveilling state and lends a voice to those that stand in resilient defiance of such blatant abuse of power.

Almost Human

The filmmaker Jeppe Rønde has invited 10 of the world's foremost researchers - and a robot! - to rethink our relationship with technology and its dilemmas from the outside. Philosophers, anthropologists, archaeologists and programmers show us through their thought experiments that our relationship with technology is just as much about our relationship with ourselves.

The Above

A U.S. military surveillance balloon floats on a tether high above Kabul, Afghanistan. Its capacities are both highly classified and deeply mysterious.

Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine

When Steve Jobs died the world wept. But what accounted for the grief of millions of people who didn’t know him? This evocative film navigates Jobs' path from a small house in the suburbs, to zen temples in Japan, to the CEO's office of the world's richest company, exploring how Jobs’ life and work shaped our relationship with the computer. The Man in the Machine is a provocative and sometimes startling re-evaluation of the legacy of an icon.

MLK/FBI

Based on newly declassified files, the film explores the US government’s surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Knit's Island

Somewhere on the internet is a land where communities pretend to live out a survivalist fiction. The avatars of the directors of Knit’s Island spent 963 hours there, creating a fascinating film resulting from their encounter with these communities. The “players” reveal their fears and fantasies, in an at times unsettling blurring of the real and the virtual.

Surviving Progress

Humanity’s ascent is often measured by the speed of progress. But what if progress is actually spiraling us downwards, towards collapse? Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, “A Short History Of Progress” inspired “Surviving Progress”, shows how past civilizations were destroyed by “progress traps”—alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the world’s resources accelerates and financial elites bankrupt nations, can our globally-entwined civilization escape a final, catastrophic progress trap? With potent images and illuminating insights from thinkers who have probed our genes, our brains, and our social behaviour, this requiem to progress-as-usual also poses a challenge: to prove that making apes smarter isn’t an evolutionary dead-end.

Romantic Chorus

A feature animated-documentary that focuses on sex and romantic connections featuring 21 diverse interviews with people from a wide range of genders, cultural backgrounds, abilities, and sexual orientations as they discuss Sex, Monogamy, Fear and Technology. The film is also collaboration of our production staff and 17 animators from 10 countries.

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley

With a magical new invention that promised to revolutionize blood testing, Elizabeth Holmes became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, heralded as the next Steve Jobs. Then, overnight, her 10-billion-dollar company dissolved. The rise and fall of Theranos is a window into the psychology of fraud.

More Than Robots

More Than Robots follows four international teams of teenagers as they prepare for the 2020 FIRST Robotics Competition. Get to know competitors from Los Angeles, Mexico City and Chiba, Japan as they work towards the ultimate goal of taking their unique designs all the way to the highly competitive global championships. Along the way they must overcome challenges such as having limited resources or putting everything on hold because of the COVID pandemic. The kids persevere and learn that there is a lot more to the competition than just robots.

Surveilled

Uncover the insidious ways in which our daily lives are being surveilled by the state. In a gripping chase, Ronan Farrow travels across the world following breadcrumbs and finally exposing a dark world of spywares, hacking, and peddling of private information, where activists and journalists are persecuted, and no one is protected from the watchful and vicious eyes of authoritarianism.

Acoustic Ocean

Acoustic Ocean is an artistic exploration of the sonic ecology of marine life in the North Atlantic. Located on the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway, the video centers on the performance of a marine-biologist diver who is using a life-size model of a submersible equipped with all sorts of hydrophones and recording devices. In this science-fictional quest, her task is to sense the submarine space for acoustic and bioluminescent forms of expression.

A Good American

A Good American tells the story of the best code-breaker the USA ever had and how he and a small team within NSA created a surveillance tool that could pick up any electronic signal on earth, filter it for targets and render results in real-time while keeping the privacy as demanded by the US constitution.

Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer

Thom Andersen's hour-long documentary adroitly combines biography, history, film theory, and philosophical reflection. Muybridge's photographic studies of animal locomotion in the 1870s were a major forerunner of movies; even more interesting are his subsequent studies of diverse people, photographed against neutral backgrounds.

National Bird

Sonia Kennebeck takes on the controversial tactic of drone warfare, and demands accountability through the personal accounts—recollections, traumas, and responses—of three American military veterans whose lives have been shaken by the roles they played in this controversial method of attack.

Their Eyes

How does a machine learn to read the world? Testimonies and screen recordings introduce the experience of online micro-workers from the Global South: their job is to teach the AI of self-driving cars to navigate the streets of the Global North.