Media Beat

Documentary Spotlight: Engage Faculty and Students with Research Films

This month, Media Services highlights documentaries perfect for enriching teaching and research. Explore timely and impactful topics like AI, health, medicine, and psychology through films like iHuman (AI), The Invisible Extinction (Health/Medicine), and Resilience: The Biology of Stress & the Science of Hope (Psychology), fostering critical thinking and deeper student engagement.

Access these films through the library’s Academic Video Online subscription, accessible via IUCAT. On and off-campus access is available with your IU CAS login.

image of a robotic face

iHuman (AI). 2019, 100min.  Director, Tonje Hessen Schei; producer, Jonathan Borge Lie.  iHuman is a political thriller that explores the creeping expansion of artificial intelligence under an illusion of democracy and freedom of choice. The film follows pioneers on the front lines of the invisible AI revolution, exposing how this technology is being developed and implemented. In iHuman, some of the brightest minds in the AI industry decrypt a roadmap to our future. Who is really holding the code?

still image of cells and microbes

The Invisible Extinction: the Race to Save Our Vanishing Microbes (Health/Medicine). 2022, 86min. Director and producers Steven Lawrence and Sarah Schenck.   Two globetrotting microbiologists, Gloria Dominguez-Bello and Marty Blaser, race to save our vanishing microbes before it’s too late. The Invisible Extinction joins them on this urgent quest from the USA to Venezuela, China, Israel, and Switzerland, revealing how the overuse of antibiotics, elective C-sections, and processed foods are driving the destruction of our inner ecology, which is happening even faster than climate change. At the same time, the film tells the stories of three patients, in the USA and China, who suffer from life-threatening diseases triggered by microbial loss and are trying experimental treatments that hold hope. As the Covid-19 pandemic hits, Marty pivots to focus on how our microbes may help protect us from the virus and future pandemics, while Gloria spearheads the creation of an international microbe vault to safeguard precious specimens.

a woman nurse interacts with a young boy

Resilience: The Biology of Stress & the Science of Hope (Psychology). 2015, 61min. Directed by James Redford; produced by James Redford, Karen Pritzker.  The original research was controversial, but the findings revealed the most important public health findings of a generation. RESILIENCE is a one-hour documentary that delves into the science of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and the birth of a new movement to treat and prevent Toxic Stress. Now understood to be one of the leading causes of everything from heart disease and cancer to substance abuse and depression, extremely stressful experiences in childhood can alter brain development and have lifelong effects on health and behavior.

Images courtesy of the Academic Video Online streaming database.

Monique Threatt, Head, Media Services since 2001.

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