Skint: The Truth About Britain's Broken Economy (2024)

Maxed Out

Maxed Out takes us on a journey deep inside the American debt-style, where everything seems okay as long as the minimum monthly payment arrives on time. Sure, most of us may have that sinking feeling that something isn't quite right, but we're told not to worry. After all, there's always more credit!

The Cost of Cobalt

In the cobalt mining areas of Katanga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), babies are being born with horrific birth defects. Scientists and doctors are finding increasing evidence of environmental pollution from industrial mining which, they believe, may be the cause of a range of malformations from cleft palate to some so serious the baby is stillborn. More than 60% of the world’s reserves of cobalt are in the DRC and this mineral is essential for the production of electric car batteries, which may be the key to reducing carbon emissions and to slowing climate change. In The Cost of Cobalt we meet the doctors treating the children affected and the scientists who are measuring the pollution. Cobalt may be part of the global solution to climate change, but is it right that Congo’s next generation pay the price with their health? Many are hoping that the more the world understands their plight, the more pressure will be put on the industry here to clean up its act.

The Bubble

Diving deep into the true causes of the Great Recession, the financial crisis of the 2010s, renowned economists, investors and business leaders explain what America is facing if we don't learn from our past mistakes. Is the economy really improving or are we just blowing up another Bubble?

Money as Debt

Paul Grignon's 47-minute animated presentation of "Money as Debt" tells in very simple and effective graphic terms what money is and how it is being created

Capitalism: A Love Story

Michael Moore comes home to the issue he's been examining throughout his career: the disastrous impact of corporate dominance on the everyday lives of Americans (and by default, the rest of the world).

Empire City

A film essay contrasting the modern metropolis with its "golden age" from 1830-1930, with the participation of some of New York's leading political and cultural figures. Made at a time when the city was experiencing unprecedented real estate development on the one hand and unforeseen displacement of population and deterioration on the other. Empire City is the story of two New Yorks. The film explores the precarious coexistence of the service-based midtown Manhattan corporate headquarters with the peripheral New York of undereducated minorities living in increasing alienation.

Let's Make Money

Let’s Make Money is an Austrian documentary by Erwin Wagenhofer released in the year 2008. It is about aspects of the development of the world wide financial system.

Roger & Me

A documentary about the closure of General Motors' plant at Flint, Michigan, which resulted in the loss of 30,000 jobs. Details the attempts of filmmaker Michael Moore to get an interview with GM CEO Roger Smith.

From the Kill Pen

Horse slaughter is more than inhumane. It's big business.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

A documentary about the Enron corporation, its faulty and corrupt business practices, and how they led to its fall.

The Corporation

Since the late 18th century American legal decision that the business corporation organizational model is legally a person, it has become a dominant economic, political and social force around the globe. This film takes an in-depth psychological examination of the organization model through various case studies. What the study illustrates is that in the its behaviour, this type of "person" typically acts like a dangerously destructive psychopath without conscience. Furthermore, we see the profound threat this psychopath has for our world and our future, but also how the people with courage, intelligence and determination can do to stop it.

RUIN: Money, Ego and Deception at FTX

RUIN is a feature documentary about Sam Bankman-Fried and the stunning collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, as narrated by Bloomberg journalists and some of the central players in the rise of digital assets.

The Price We Pay

A documentary on the history and present-day reality of big-business tax avoidance, which has seen multinationals depriving governments of trillions of dollars in tax revenues by harboring profits in offshore havens.

Japan Inc: Lessons for North America?

Discipline and productivity are more regimented in Japan than in many other parts of the world. For the Japanese, survival means doing things together rather than asserting North-American-style individualism. Japan's industry has automated and computerized at an unparalleled rate. Open-concept offices and collaborative work styles offer a model of the changing style of modern work that could inspire the West to modify their processes as well.

Manufactured Landscapes

MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is the striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris.

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn explore the causes and costs of addiction, poverty and incarceration plaguing America, from the inner city to small towns like Kristof's hometown of Yamhill, Oregon. While pockets of empathy and aid exist, are they enough to rescue the thousands of Americans in despair, for whom the American Dream of self-reliance is impossibly out of reach?

The Shock Doctrine

An investigation of "disaster capitalism", based on Naomi Klein's proposition that neo-liberal capitalism feeds on natural disasters, war and terror to establish its dominance.

Laissez-faire

A historical perspective to understand Neoliberalism and to understand why this ideology today so profoundly influences the choices of our governments and our lives.

Freakonomics

Some of the world's most innovative documentary filmmakers will explore the hidden side of everything.

1929: The Great Crash

A documentary exploring the causes of the 1929 Wall Street Crash.Over six terrifying, desperate days in October 1929, shares crashed by a third on the New York Stock Exchange. More than $25 billion in individual wealth was lost. Later, three thousand banks failed, taking people's savings with them. Surviving eyewitnesses describe the biggest financial catastrophe in history.

Inside Job

A film that exposes the shocking truth behind the economic crisis of 2008. The global financial meltdown, at a cost of over $20 trillion, resulted in millions of people losing their homes and jobs. Through extensive research and interviews with major financial insiders, politicians and journalists, Inside Job traces the rise of a rogue industry and unveils the corrosive relationships which have corrupted politics, regulation and academia.

Cybersocialism: Project Cybersyn & The CIA Coup in Chile

A documentary on the rise and fall of Project Cybersyn, an attempt at a computer-managed centralized economy undertaken in Chile during the presidency of Salvador Allende.

The Emperor's New Clothes

The reality of life before, during, and after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the profound effects the economic agreements between big business and government can have on human lives. Filmed over a three year period in Canada, the United States, and Mexico, this documentary poses a sobering question: In this global war of cut-rate economies, are people on the losing side?

Laboratory Greece

A journey through Greece and Europe’s past and recent history: from the Second World War to the current crisis. It is a historical documentary, a look into many stories. «If Democracy can be destroyed in Greece, it can be destroyed throughout Europe» Paul Craig Roberts

Requiem for the American Dream

Through interviews filmed over four years, Noam Chomsky unpacks the principles that have brought us to the crossroads of historically unprecedented inequality – tracing a half-century of policies designed to favor the most wealthy at the expense of the majority – while also looking back on his own life of activism and political participation. He provides penetrating insight into what may well be the lasting legacy of our time – the death of the middle class, and swan song of functioning democracy.

Princes of the Yen

Set in 20th Century Japan the documentary explores the role and power of Central Banks and how they can be used to change a country's economic political and social structures A documentary adaption off the book by Professor Richard Werner.

Bathtubs Over Broadway

When he started as a comedy writer for the Late Show with David Letterman, Steve Young had few interests and not many friends outside of his day job. But while gathering material for a segment on the show, Steve stumbled onto a few vintage record albums that would change his life forever.

The Forecaster

MARTIN ARMSTRONG, once a US based trillion dollar financial adviser, used the number pi to predict economic turning points with precision. When some big New York bankers asked him to join the club to help them to take over Russia, he refused to join the manipulation. A few days later the FBI stormed his offices accusing him of a 3 billion dollar Ponzi Scheme - an attempt to stop him talking about the real Ponzi Scheme of debts that the US has build up over the years and which he thinks starts to collapse after October 1, 2015, a mayor pi turning point he is predicting.

Collapse

From the acclaimed director of American Movie, the documentary follows former Los Angeles police officer turned independent reporter Michael Ruppert. He recounts his career as a radical thinker and spells out his apocalyptic vision of the future, spanning the crises in economics, energy, environment and more.

Loyalty Cards: Are They Worth It?

Alexis Conran investigates whether loyalty cards save consumers money when shopping, looking into the possibility that supermarkets could be inflating prices only to discount them. Alexis discovers how supermarkets offer a reduced price in return for an exchange of data from shoppers, speaking to those responsible for handling the data and making profits from it.

Langhe Doc

Three characters, three stories of "heretics", three food producers who think in a different way to describe the transformation of our Country in what in “Langhe Doc” Giorgio Bocca calls the Italy of warehouses. We're in Langhe, a unique territory, universally recognized as one of the most beautiful places in Italy, fresh candidate for Unesco World Heritage but afflicted by uncontrolled economic development, urbanization, overbuilding, abandonment of the less profitable areas. Those of Maria Theresa, Silvio and Mauro are stories of people who have insight into a future they do not like and have chosen to refuse it. Their challenges are still open, they're not yet fully met and perhaps they never will: these heretics move in one direction, while the world moves in another, quite the opposite one.

The One Percent

Jamie Johnson takes the exploration of wealth that he began in Born Rich one step further. The One Percent, refers to the tiny percentage of Americans who control nearly half the wealth of the U.S. Johnson's thesis is that this wealth in the hands of so few people is a danger to our very way of life.

Hard Times: Lost on Long Island

Though the recession officially ended in summer 2009, the fallout continues for some 25 million unemployed and underemployed Americans, many of whom worked their way up the corporate ladder..

Surviving Progress

Humanity’s ascent is often measured by the speed of progress. But what if progress is actually spiraling us downwards, towards collapse? Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, “A Short History Of Progress” inspired “Surviving Progress”, shows how past civilizations were destroyed by “progress traps”—alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the world’s resources accelerates and financial elites bankrupt nations, can our globally-entwined civilization escape a final, catastrophic progress trap? With potent images and illuminating insights from thinkers who have probed our genes, our brains, and our social behaviour, this requiem to progress-as-usual also poses a challenge: to prove that making apes smarter isn’t an evolutionary dead-end.

The True Cost

Film from Andrew Morgan. The True Cost is a documentary film exploring the impact of fashion on people and the planet.

Chasing Madoff

A look at how one investigator spent ten years trying to expose Bernie Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme that scammed an estimated $18 billion from investors.

Detropia

Detroit’s story has encapsulated the iconic narrative of America over the last century – the Great Migration of African Americans escaping Jim Crow; the rise of manufacturing and the middle class; the love affair with automobiles; the flowering of the American dream; and now… the collapse of the economy and the fading American mythos.

Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?

Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? reveals how American corporations orchestrated the dismantling of middle-class prosperity through rampant deregulation, the outsourcing of jobs, and tax policies favoring businesses and the wealthy. The collapse of the U.S. economy is the result of conscious choices made over thirty five years by a small group: leaders of corporations and their elected allies, and the biggest lobbying interest in Washington, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. To these individuals, the collapse is not a catastrophe, but rather the planned outcome of their long, patient work. For the rest of the country, it is merely the biggest heist in American history.

The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel

Two decades after the initial exposé of the corporation, this follow-up unveils a world now fully remade in its image and perilously close to fascism.

Sweden: Lessons for America?

It's been suggested that Americans would be better off if the United States was more like Sweden. Do the Swedes know something that we don't? Sweden: Lessons for America? A Personal Exploration by Johan Norberg delves into the economic and social landscape of the Swedish scholar's homeland. Join him to see that the lessons to be learned from Sweden may not be the ones you expect. The one-hour documentary follows Norberg on a journey through the history of Sweden's economic rise, from one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the most prosperous. The program illuminates key ideas and enterprises that sparked the reform and continue to help Sweden maintain its lofty economic position, including freedom of the press, free trade, new technology companies, crazy jobs and even an old Swedish superhero.

Four Horsemen

Documentary about the modern apocalypse caused by a rapacious banking system. 23 leading thinkers – frustrated at the failure of their respective disciplines – break their silence to explain how the world really works.

The Hollow Men

The 'stolen' insider emails that informed Nicky Hager's best-selling account of National's 2005 election campaign return in Alister Barry's (Someone Else's Country) new film - just in time to caution us against campaigning politicians in 2008. Addressing each other like schoolboy Machiavellis, party leader Don Brash and his advisors spelled out how they'd copy the big boys in Australia and the US in order to win the votes of people who'd never support the kind of policies such men are widely presumed to represent. The dividing and conquering began at Orewa.

Trailblazers: The New Zealand Story

New Zealand is a place of great natural beauty and resources, of pioneering immigrants from the Maori to the more recent settlers. They’re fierce, hardy, and strong, able to withstand challenges like the massive economic challenge they faced in the mid 1980’s. With their economy unraveling, they made huge, controversial changes, including doing away with farm subsidies and protectionist import controls. At first, it hurt. A lot. But now, the farmers and the fishers, the people and the economy, are prospering. And they wouldn’t go back to subsidies, special interests, or support for manufacturers. Travel to New Zealand with scholar Johan Norberg to meet some amazing Kiwis and see how they blazed a trail to economic prosperity.

A Century of Energy

Manoel de Oliveira's final work revisits one of his earliest films and celebrates a century of industrialization in Portugal.

All for the good of the World and Nosovice

An original portrayal of a small Czech village where – as the locals put it – an UFO has landed in the form of a kilometre-long silverish factory: a Korean Hyundai automobile plant. The village, hitherto famous mostly for its sauerkraut and the “Radegast” beer was thus turned into an industrial zone – the largest greenfield investment project in the Czech Republic’s history. Nonetheless, for a long time many farmers resisted selling the land upon which the factory was now standing. Eventually, they all succumbed under the pressure from the neighbours, and even the anonymous death threats. The filmmakers returned to Nošovice two years after the dramatic property buyouts, at the time when the factory has just started churning out cheap cars. Combining the perspectives of seven characters, they have composed a portrayal of a place suddenly changed beyond recognition that is playful and chilling at the same time: a politically engaged absurd flick about a field that yields cars.