A Frontline Investigation into the price of our addiction to oil & gas
Deal with the Devil will take us on a journey from the battlefields to the boardrooms to uncover the hidden forces holding back the transformation of the entire global energy system.
Follow journalist Kim Paul Nguyen as he sets out to discover what’s making it so hard for us to give up Russian oil and gas. Is change to the global energy system is even possible, and if it is, what can ordinary people do to make it happen?
“This is Reality” is an abstract exploration into the lasting impact of conflict, set in the independent nation of East Timor. East Timor endured a brutal 24-year Indonesian occupation from 1975-1999 in which around 200,000 people were killed or disappeared.
Few carry these scars more distinctively than Osme Gonsalves, a celebrated artist, singer, poet, actor, and prominent ex-resistance fighter, who struggles to find peace despite the goal of sovereignty being reached. Frustrated by his nation’s perceived apathy, Osme creates a fake reality television show to travel the districts and interview the population about the contemporary reality of their lives.
Although tribal fighting has long been present in the Papua New Guinea highlands, the influx of modern automatic weaponry in the 1990s turned local disputes into swift lethal exchanges which threatened to permanently reshape highlands culture.
Bootlegged copies of the American film Rambo circulated in remote communities, becoming a crude tutorial on the use
of such weaponry. The influence of the film was so pronounced that the term Rambo is now used in Papuan dialects to describe hired mercenaries who are paid to support local combatants in violent tribal disputes. The services of Rambos were suddenly in high demand as a variety of M16s and Indonesian military weaponry found its way down the Sepik River through swap-laden smuggling routes.