Monday 17th May
BBC4 - Mental: A History of the Madhouse - "Documentary which tells the fascinating and poignant story of the closure of Britain's mental asylums. In the post-war period, 150,000 people were hidden away in 120 of these vast Victorian institutions all across the country. Today, most mental patients, or service users as they are now called, live out in the community and the asylums have all but disappeared. Through powerful testimonies from patients, nurses and doctors, the film explores this seismic revolution and what it tells us about society's changing attitudes to mental illness over the last sixty years."
Tuesday 18th
More 4 - True Stories: Mugabe and the White African - "Andrew Thompson and Lucy Bailey's film in the True Stories strand tells of how one white farmer took on the Zimbabwe government and took Robert Mugabe himself to court.
Mike Campbell ran a mango farm in Zimbabwe which was reallocated to a poor black family (in reality, the son of one of Mugabe's former ministers) under Mugabe's Land Reform Programme. But Campbell and his son-in-law Ben Freeth took their case to a tribunal of the Southern African Development Community, an international court in Namibia, arguing the eviction was based on racial discrimination, which is illegal in Zimbabwe.
The case dragged on for over a year, during which Campbell and his family were intimidated by armed gangs, kidnapped and tortured to within an inch of their lives. This film is an intimate account of one family's bravery in the face of state brutality and whose fight for justice has implications for ordinary Zimbabweans who continue to suffer at the hands of Mugabe and his regime."
Friday 21st
Channel 4 - Unreported World: Inside Burma's Secret State - "Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Simon Phillips spend two weeks trekking through forests to reveal the devastation the Burmese army is inflicting as it intensifies its war against the Karen people.
The team are smuggled across the Salaween river from Thailand in a small boat, covered by tarpaulin. On the other side, the few roads in Karen State are controlled by the Burmese military, so the only safe route is over mountains and through dense jungle.
The Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) scouts acting as the team's guides have been part of an army that has been fighting the Burmese for 60 years. The Karen are one of Burma's hill tribes who see themselves as culturally distinct from the Burmese, with their own language, and unlike the Buddhist Burmese, they are predominantly Christian. The Burmese army has stepped up its offensive against the Karen people, who are confined to mountainous jungle and encircled.
One Karen guide, Saw-Sun, claims that the Burmese army forces Karen villagers to do their most dangerous jobs, such as walking through minefields to clear a path, and that in the latest round of fighting the army burnt Karen villages to the ground.
After four days' trekking, they find signs that they are near the scene of these attacks; hundreds of people - most of them women and children - are sleeping rough in the jungle. A village elder claims the army has driven nearly 3,000 people in the area from their homes, and they are now living in temporary camps.
One woman tells Rhodes that she and her four young children have been in the camp for two months since their village was attacked. Mu-Si-Kpoh says she only had two hours to pack and get out of her house before the Burmese soldiers arrived."
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* This applies to staff members and students at the University of Gloucestershire only. Any recordings made are to be used only for educational and non-commercial purposes under the terms of the ERA Licence.
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