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Director: Erwin Wagenhofer
Let's Make Money follows the trail of our money through the worldwide finance system. What do our retirement savings have to do with the property blow-up? We don't have to buy a home in order to be involved. As soon as we open an account, we're part of the worldwide finance market—whether we want to be or not. We customers have no idea where our debtors live and what they do to pay our interest fees. Most of us aren't even interested, because we like to follow the call of the banks to "Let your money work." But money can't work. Only people, animals or machines can work. The film starts at the Ahafo mine in Ghana, West Africa, where vast areas are being blasted open. Gold is extracted from the rock in a tedious process, then smelted and flown directly to Switzerland. The spoils are divided up disproportionally: 3% for Africa, 97% for the West. The mine was opened with the assistance of the World Bank. "I don't think the investor should be responsible for the ethics, the pollution or anything the company in which he has invested produces. That's not his job. His job is to invest and earn money for his clients," says Mark Mobius, president of Templeton Emerging Markets. "In the end it's always the so-called man or woman on the street who's left paying the bills," says Hermann Scheer, winner of the alternative Nobel Prize and a member of German Parliament.
In 1981 Erwin Wagenhofer presented his first short film Endstation Normal. Two years later his short film Das Loch was shown at the Krakau Film Festival. From that year until 1987 he worked as a directing and camera assistant for several ORF productions as well as for movies and documentaries. Since 1987 he has been a freelance author and film director. In 1988 he portrayed the artist Oswald Oberhuber in Das Fragmentarische in der Kunst. Since 2002 he has been teaching at Universität für angewandte Kunst in Vienna. In 2005 Wagenhofer directed We Feed the World, produced by Allegro Film. It is about the industrialization of food production and shows international agricultural politics from a critical viewpoint, especially with regards to the role of the EU. More than 800,000 people in Europe saw the film, which was shown at numerous festivals and won several prizes.
John Hoskyns-Abrahall
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©2010 United Nations Association Film Festival (UNAFF) |
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