Let's Make Money

The documentary starts with a question: where does the money you put in the bank, the contribution you pay into a pension fund and your insurance actually go. The camera follows the money and travels from Austria to Ghana, India, Burkina Faso and Spain. At every stop the same thing appears: the return earned in one place is paid for somewhere else, and the person paying is never the person who took the decision. Erwin Wagenhofer had earlier made We Feed the World about the food system, and his method here is the same: little commentary, many locations, people telling it in their own words. The fund manager Mark Mobius is among those speaking and defends what he defends openly. The film argues a case and does not systematically call in the opposing view; because it was made just before the 2008 crisis it was much discussed at the time. The section on the empty housing estates in Spain is still its harshest.