Watch it Raise your consciousness of capitalism’s collateral damage with these documentaries and a drama, widely available in multiple languages. Saving Capitalism 2017: 73 minutes
“We are a two-tiered society composed of a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind,” says Robert Reich, former U.S. labor secretary and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Inspired by Reich’s 2015 book of the same name, this Netflix documentary follows the author as he talks mostly to those left behind. “In the richest country in the history of the world, nobody should be working and not making it,” he states. “The game is rigged.” An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power 2017: 99 minutes
A decade after An Inconvenient Truth (2006) raised public awareness about climate change, this follow-up continues former U.S. vice president Al Gore’s mission to save Planet Earth. The good news is the 2016 signing of the Paris climate agreement. The bad news is there’s much more to be done. “The next generation would be justified in looking back at us and asking, ‘What were you thinking? Couldn’t you hear what the scientists were saying? Couldn’t you hear what Mother Nature was screaming at you?’”
Inside Job 2010: 108 minutes
Was the 2008 financial crisis an “inside job,” as this hard-hitting documentary’s title suggests? Interviews with some of those wielding power and close observers help make a powerful case. In the words of its director, this film is about “the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial services industry and the consequences of that systemic corruption.” Unfortunately, unlike in a Hollywood movie, the alleged bad guys get away with it all.
Blood Diamond 2006: 143 minutes
A fictional rendering of the horrors of the trade in blood or conflict diamonds, including the plight of a boy forced into service as a rebel soldier. Set in Sierra Leone amid its civil war in the late 1990s, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a rogue gem smuggler who finds himself caught up in the saga of a family pulled apart by forces that value stones as more precious than human lives.
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