R; 1h 37m
Emily (Aubrey Plaza) is saddled with student debt and locked out of the job market due to a minor criminal record. Desperate for income, she takes a shady gig as a “dummy shopper,” buying goods with stolen credit cards supplied by a handsome and charismatic middleman named Youcef (Theo Rossi). Faced with a series of dead-end job interviews, Emily soon finds herself seduced by the quick cash and illicit thrills of black-market capitalism, and increasingly interested in her mentor Youcef. Together, they hatch a plan to bring their business to the next level in Los Angeles.
Director
Category Archives: Finance
Emily the Criminal (2022)
FAIR PLAY (2023)
R; 1h 53m
Luke and Emily don’t just live together – they also work together as analysts in the high-stakes and high-pressure world of finance, forced to abide by company policy and keep their relationship secret. When a job opens up above them, Emily is thrilled to hear whispers that it might be going to Luke. But when it ultimately ends up hers, the couple is forced into a difficult situation. With the tables turned, Luke finds it harder to support her success and the pair start to unravel. With a delicacy that more genre films aiming to tackle weightier topics could afford to emulate, Domont cooly constructs a contemporary story about how a gendered disparity in finance and power can wreck a seemingly successful relationship.Back in 1994, the corporate thriller Disclosure posited that the only thing scarier than a woman scorned was a woman scorned who was also your boss, painting a laughably dated portrait of the evils of having women climb the corporate ladder. Fair Play, while recalling many a Michael Douglas thriller from Fatal Attraction to A Perfect Murder, is a smart rebuke to such misogyny. The biggest threat here ends up being a man’s ego.(Benjamin Lee, The Guardian)
Director/Writer: Chloe Domont
The Big Short (2015)
Director: Adam McKay
Writers: Charles Randolph (screenplay by), Adam McKay (screenplay by)
Stars: Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling
Boom, Bust, Boom (2016)
Directed by: Bill Jones & Terry Jones & Ben Timlett
Running Time: 75 min
Starring: N/a
Website: N/a
Synopsis: The result of a meeting between writer, director, historian and Python Terry Jones and economics professor and entrepreneur Theo Kocken. Co-written by Jones and Kocken and featuring John Cusack, Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman, Robert J. Shiller and Paul Krugman, the film is part of a global movement to change the economic system through education to protect the world from boom and bust. A unique look at why economic crashes happen, Boom Bust Boom is a multimedia documentary combining live action with animation and puppetry to explain economics to everyone.
Labour in a Single Shot
http://www.labour-in-a-single-shot.net
Starting in 2011 artist, curator, and author Antje Ehmann and filmmaker, video artist and author Harun Farocki initiated video production workshops in 15 cities around the world in which participants were to engage with the subject of ‘labour’: paid and unpaid, material and immaterial, traditional or new. The videos could not be longer than two minutes and they had to be taken in a single shot. The camera could be static, panning or travelling but cuts were not allowed. This concept references the Brother Lumière’s famous film Workers Leaving the Factory which was filmed in one continuous take from a fixed camera position.
The result of these workshops, which were organised together with local branches of the Goethe-Institut, are 400 films which show people engaged in all kinds of work, each film taking a different stance, literally and figuratively, towards its subject while also recording the diverse mental attitudes and bodily relation people have to their work.
Facing the challenge of filming something that might be essentially repetitive, continuous and boring, the films also foreground the work of the camera operator and his or her aesthetic decisions. In the multitude and diversity the films form a visual compendium and an archive of labour and cinema in the 21st century that is never boring or repetitive but enhances and simultaneously questions our perception and understanding of work.
All the films can be watched on a dedicated website, at random, or sorted by city, colour or type of work. A selection of 90 films was shown as an installation at the House of World Culture in Berlin from 27 February to 6 April 2015 with an accompanying conference. This exhibition also presented the project ‘Workers Leaving the Factory in 15 Cities’ (2011 – 2014), consisting of contemporary remakes of the famous film by the Lumière Brothers which were shot in 15 cities all over the world. Also included in the exhibition was the installation ‘Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades’ (2006), which showed scenes of workers leaving the factory throughout the history of cinema, from the Lumière Brothers (1895) to Lars van Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000).
‘Labour in a Single Shot’ is a co-production of the Harun Farocki Filmproduktion with the Goethe-Institut.
Inequality For All (2013)
Jacob Kornbluth, 2013, 89 min
Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich looks to raise awareness of the country’s widening economic gap.
Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? (2011)
75m; U.S.
Director: Frances Cause and Donald Goldmacher
Synopsis: HEIST: Who Stole the American Dream? is stunning audiences across the globe, as it exposes the real truth behind the worldwide economic collapse, tracing its origins to a 1971 secret memo entitled Attack on American Free Enterprise. Written over 40 years ago by the future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, at the behest of the US Chamber of Commerce, the 6-page memo, a free-market utopian treatise, called for a money fueled big business makeover of government through corporate control of the media, academia, the pulpit, arts and sciences and destruction of organized labor and consumer protection groups.
Sound familiar? Today’s crisis and heart stopping headlines can be directly traced to Powell’s real “end game” which was business control of law and politics. Powell’s fingerprints are all over Citizens United, the fateful Supreme Court decision which gave corporations and the super rich unlimited ability to shape our elections with virtually unrestricted donations. HEIST’s step by step detail exposes the systemic implementation of Powell’s memo by BOTH U.S. political parties over the last forty years culminating in the deregulation of industry, outsourcing of jobs and regressive taxation. All of which led us to the global financial crisis of 2008 and the continued dismantling of the American middle class.
Today, politics is the playground of the rich and powerful, with no thought given to the hopes and dreams of ordinary Americans. No other film goes as deeply as HEIST in explaining the greatest heist of our time. Moving beyond the white noise of today’s polarizing media, HEIST provides viewers with a clear, concise and fact-based explanation of how we got into this mess, and what we need to do to restore our representative democracy.
Contact: http://www.heist-themovie.com/index.html
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