Long Story Short
"It's the Economy, Stupid!" • 45m
Directed by Natalie Bookchin • Documentary • 2016 • 45 minutes
In the moving and immersive film LONG STORY SHORT, over 100 people at homeless shelters, food banks, adult literacy programs, and job training centers in Los Angeles and the Bay Area in Northern California discuss their experiences of poverty: why they are poor, how it feels, and what they think should be done about American poverty and homelessness today. Numerous interviews by the artist and MacArthur Grantee Natalie Bookchin are stitched together to form a polyphonic account of American poverty told from the inside.
"An incredible work of montage on the collective power of speech."—Maria Bonsanti, Artistic Director, Cinema du Reel
"[The film's] candid but humanizing approach interrupts the prejudice and pity commonly directed toward individuals living in poverty, revealing instead the long-term, systemic nature of economic disenfranchisement."—Jennifer Gonzalez, Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture, UC Santa Cruz
Up Next in "It's the Economy, Stupid!"
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We Are Not Ghosts
Directed by Mark Dworkin & Melissa Young • Documentary • 2012 • 52 minutes
Fifty years ago Detroit was booming with two million hard-working people living the American Dream. Then the auto industry crashed and so did the Motor City. Most moved away; whole neighborhoods turned into wastelands...
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System Error
Directed by Florian Opitz • Documentary • 2017 • 96 minutes
SYSTEM ERROR takes us from to the roots of the expectation of unlimited growth, particularly in the post-World War II years, to the financial crash of 2008 and beyond. Does the subsequent decade of simultaneous inequality, austerity, an...
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Monobloc
Directed by Hauke Wendler • Documentary • 2022 • 90 minutes
Universally recognized yet frequently discarded, the monobloc plastic chair has been the world’s best-selling piece of furniture since its invention in the 1970s, with over a billion units in circulation worldwide.
Hauke Wendler’s feat...