Producer
A freelance illustrator in New York suffers a quarter-life crisis and leaves his home for the west coast.
The Cat
Jimmy Grimble is a shy Manchester school boy. At school he is constantly being bullied by the other kids, and at home he has to face his mother's new boyfriend. However, through football, and some special boots, he manages to gain the confidence to succeed and leads his school football team towards the final of the local schools cup.
Producer
Documentary about innocent people confined to prison on remand. John Pilger reports that more than half of the 500,000 people remanded in custody by magistrates each year are eventually found not guilty, fined or, as in the case of “Helen”, given a conditional discharge. Helen, charged with stealing a pair of slippers but with no previous convictions, recalls her day in Holloway Prison, London, which started at 7am when she joined 96 other prisoners in a rush to use four toilets whose conditions were “disgusting”. Between then and lunchtime, all prisoners were locked up, with just half-an-hour’s walk round a large yard for exercise. Lunch was eaten in cells, with tea at 3.30pm, before they were locked up until the following morning.
Director
In this, the first of his 58 documentary films, John Pilger combines candid interviews and amazing frontline footage of Vietnam to portray a growing rift between the US military bureaucrats - "lifers" - and the soldiers who physically and mentally fight the war on the ground, the "grunts". By 1970, it is an internal sense of disillusionment and frustration born from this rift that is triggering the withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam.
