For ten years, Brave New Films has been producing groundbreaking documentaries that have altered the national conversation. We’ve exposed Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, the Koch Brothers’ efforts to buy their very own customized government, shameless war profiteering by some of our largest corporations, and the impact of a certain terrible big box retail chain, which has a habit of destroying the communities in which they build their stores.

But did you also know that Brave New Films launched the Cuéntame project, one of the largest online outlets for the Latino community, or Beyond Bars, a social media and video campaign against mass incarceration? Did you know we’ve also continued our work exposing the human and financial costs of war through our War Costs campaign?

No? We were worried about that. That’s why we’re rebranding all the work we do under one Brave New Films banner. We’ll be exploring the same issues we always have and giving a voice to the people on the receiving end of humankind’s worst injustices.

When riots erupted at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, police responded with billy clubs and helmets. Now, when a riot of a smaller magnitude breaks out — such as in Ferguson, Missouri — the police roll in with body armor, mine-resistant vehicles and automatic weapons.

The police’s aggressive handling of the situation has not sat well with the country. Images from the event more closely resemble an occupying force in Kabul, Afghanistan than civilian police in a Midwestern town of 21,000. As shown in Brave New Films’ latest video, this problem is not only happening in Ferguson. 

The United States is notorious for blinded idealism. In 2003 we instigated a conflict in a region that most Americans couldn’t point to on a map. Yet the consequences of those decisions are still evident today. ISIS, which has seized large swaths of Syria and Iraq, is the culmination of our bad judgement. 

When Obama announced a final withdrawal from Iraq in December 2011, his former Deputy National Security Adviser, Denis McDonough said, “every assessment the White House sought about Iraq’s military showed they were up to the task of defending their country on their own.”