Ligne de Front

French writer Jean-Claude Carrière traces the life and work of Spanish painter Francisco de Goya (1746-1828).

With nearly 1.5 million soldiers and a budget of 700 billion dollars, the US army is the most powerful military force in the world. Present on all continents, it imposes American hard power abroad and helps manage natural disasters or national emergencies at home.

There are approximately 60 million evangelicals in the United States. They represent by far the largest religious group and should not be underestimated politically as voters. They take the Bible literally and believe that God created the world in six days, that the world only existed for 6,000 years, and they dismiss scientific knowledge as lies. They fear Muslims and atheists, homosexuality and permissive life. Alcohol, abortion and sex before marriage are taboo. In large parts of the United States, secularism, the separation of church and state, are being removed more and more. The filmmakers of the documentary give a frightening insight into a strange world and show a supposedly modern country, in which large parts of the population have a level of intellectual development as in the Middle Ages and are as reactionary in their worldview as in Islamist theocracies.

This hard-hitting documentary reveals the abuse suffered by the gay community all over the world. France, despite having legalized gay marriage in 2013, has seen a rise in homophobic violence in recent years. In Tunisia, gay people can be sentenced to three years in prison, simply for their sexual orientation. When arrested by the police, they are subject to an “anal examination”, a humiliating procedure of no scientific value. Uganda is one of the 27 sub-Saharan countries in which homosexuality is repressed, with active state-encouragement of homophobia, and where homosexuality is punishable by lifetime imprisonment. In the United States, more progressive laws have not translated into progressive attitudes. 700,000 Americans, in a desperate attempt to change their sexual orientation, have gone to see therapists who claim to be able to “transform any homosexual into a heterosexual.”

The Ndrangheta is the most powerful branch of the mafia which has a stranglehold on Southern Italy.

In the United States, 300,000 minors are victims of sex trafficking. Los Angeles is the hub of underage prostitution in the country. In the streets of East Hollywood, in apartments, but also in motels, groups of girls work as prostitutes under the control of their pimps. Many have been kidnapped, drugged or raped before they were forced to sell their bodies. Every girl is thought to bring in between $ 100,000 and $ 200,000 a year but the trafficking of girls is less risky for the criminals than that of arms or drugs. We follow the specialized brigade tasked with stopping the pimps, see how they dismantles pimping networks, traps sex offenders and organize rescue operations for underage prostitutes. We also meet Tika, a 38-year-old forced into prostitution as teenager who now works as an activist helping young victims.

When it comes to sex, America is a country of contradictions. They are the highest producers and consumers of porn in the world, brothels are legal and big business in Nevada and yet in conservative states like Texas, sex and sexuality are demonised and abstinence encouraged. In the last few years, a wave of puritanism has swept parts of the country and many believe that abstinence is the solution to problems such as unwanted teen pregnancy and the spread of STDs. People are afraid to talk about sex and consequentially many teenagers are growing up ignorant about condoms and contraception; resulting in a teen pregnancy rate of 8% (4 times higher than that of France). On the other side of the coin students at the prestigious Yale university, organise a controversial annual ’Sex Week’ including discussions, workshops and provocative plays. They are demanding sexual freedom, the right to information and denouncing the hypocrisy in American society on this subject.

By 2050, 30% of Bangladesh will be under water. One in three inhabitants, some 60 million people, are threatened by marine flooding. No other country in the world is so at risk from rising waters. The main culprit: global warming.