Covering pet stores, puppy mills, and animal profession, Earthlings includes footage obtained through the use of hidden cameras to chronicle the day-to-day practices of some of the largest industries in the world, all of which rely on animals. It draws parallels between racism, sexism, and speciesism.
On May 27, 2005, McMahon was forced to cancel all of his upcoming concerts after a medical examination in connection with a relentless case of laryngitis forced him into being admitted into a hospital in New York City. On June 1, 2005, he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the same day he finished recording his debut album under the Jack's Mannequin moniker, Everything in Transit. Since the illness was diagnosed in its early stages, McMahon's doctors had high hopes for a full recovery.
William Peters follows Jane Elliott's conversely controversial and lauded schoolroom exercise of dividing an otherwise homogenous group of elementary school kids by their eye color. It was a demonstration of prejudice and discrimination meant to teach the students about the unfairness of racism, developed as a response to the shooting of Martin Luther King in April 1968. The film records Elliott in 1970 while conducting the exercise for the third time.
The film focuses on the perpetrators of the Indonesian killings of 1965–66 in the present day; ostensibly towards the communist community where almost a million people were killed. When Suharto overthrew Sukarno, the President of Indonesia, following the failed coup of the 30 September Movement in 1965, the gangsters Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry in Medan (North Sumatra) were promoted from selling black market movie theatre tickets to leading the most powerful death squad in North Sumatra. They also extorted money from ethnic Chinese as the price for keeping their lives. Anwar is said to have personally killed 1,000 people.
The film explores the growth, sale and trafficking of cannabis. The documentary examines the underground market by interviewing growers, police officers, criminologists, psychologists, economists, doctors, politicians and pop culture icons, revealing how the trade is booming despite being a criminal enterprise. The history of cannabis and the reasons for its present prohibition are discussed, often comparing it to the prohibition of alcohol in the United States in the 1920s, suggesting that gang drug warfare and other negative aspects associated with cannabis are a result of prohibition, not the drug itself.
Through a 1994 ballot measure (Measure 16) named the Oregon Death with Dignity Act, Oregon became the first U.S. state and one of the first jurisdictions in the world to allow physician-assisted suicide. How to Die in Oregon covers the background of the Oregon law and the life of a few patients who have chosen to take their life under it. It also features some information about the neighboring state of Washington's attempt to legalize physician-assisted suicide in 2008 through a law (Washington Death with Dignity Act) modeled after Oregon's.