activism

I worked with many smart, talented improvisers during my time with The Spin, a political improv show I was part of last year. One of them, a particularly incisive and well-informed gentleman, produced a documentary about the origins and consequences of global poverty entitled The End of Poverty?. It was a selection at the Cannes Film Festival for Critics Week. Cannes is not known for accepting documentaries. My friend Matt (the producer) traveled there to show the film, and generate some more attention for what I imagined to be a hard to sell documentary.

I got a chance to see The End of Poverty? on Sunday at BAM, one of two screenings (the other is tonight). It is, as I expected from knowing Matt and the sort of documentary he was likely to attach his name to, a difficult and challenging documentary. I won’t pretend to be nearly as educated on the situation as the many experts who spoke about poverty during the film, but needless to say, many third world countries are stuck in a financial situation that was set in to motion hundreds of years ago. Instead of being alleviated over time, it’s, if anything, gotten worst for most of these countries as they are slowly tapped for resources by the first world.

If you didn’t already dislike multinationals like Bechtel and Halliburton, you certainly will after this film. It’s hard to come out of the documentary feeling good about globalization and indeed the US’s own policies over the last 50 years or so. I suppose the question I was left with afterwards was: If rampart poverty and the attendant suffering it causes are the end result of capitalism and setting policies in place that benefit business over all else, is it power that corrupts or do only the corrupt seek power? Either way it’s worrying.

I’ve emailed with Matt over some of the meatier issues discussed in the film and by myself afterward. Our joint conclusion seems to be that things this large are hard to do much about, other than talking about them and making people aware and what’s more, making sure you yourself are aware of them. I’ve fallen on my usual Vonnegut-paraphrasing belief of trying to be a good person without any expectation of a reward after I’m dead. It, at the very least, ensures I can look myself in the eye when necessary.

Go see The End of Poverty?, because in our Internet Age, it is information that becomes the most contagious. Hopefully we are approaching a time where accountability and transparency in government cannot be avoided. Documentaries like this are doing their part to get us there. Nice work, Matt.