2000s Films

A 2006 Dutch animated science fiction fantasy short film and the first "open movie" produced by the Blender Foundation. Directed by Bassam Kurdali, the film was created entirely with free and open-source software, primarily Blender. It tells the story of Emo and Proog, two characters exploring a strange and seemingly infinite machine. The elder, Proog, acts as a tour guide, showing off the sights and dangers of the machine to the increasingly skeptical Emo. The film, its production files, and all source assets (roughly 7 GB of data) were released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license, allowing anyone to remake, remix, and re-purpose the film. The title references a Dutch tradition of abruptly ending children's bedtime stories with a sneezing elephant.

Animation · Sci-Fi

A 2008 American independent animated musical written, directed, produced, and animated by Nina Paley. The film intersperses events from the Ramayana, light-hearted discussion of historical background by a trio of Indian shadow puppet narrators, musical interludes voiced with 1920s jazz recordings by Annette Hanshaw, and scenes from the filmmaker's own life. The ancient mythological and modern biographical plots are parallel tales, sharing numerous themes. After a prolonged copyright battle over the Hanshaw recordings, Paley released the film under a CC-0 public domain license, waiving all rights to the extent possible under law. The film has been widely distributed and shown freely online, becoming a landmark case in copyright reform advocacy.

Animation · Comedy · Musical · Drama

A 2009 French documentary film by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, produced by Luc Besson's EuropaCorp. The film is almost entirely composed of aerial shots of various places on Earth, filmed in 54 countries over 18 months. It shows the diversity of life on Earth and how humanity is threatening the ecological balance of the planet — covering agriculture, energy, water, climate change, and biodiversity. The English version is narrated by Glenn Close. The filmmaker declared the film has no copyright and made it freely available for distribution on World Environment Day, June 5, 2009, with the goal of reaching the widest possible audience.

Documentary