IDFA: Facts

Some documentaries carry out a clear message, a one-liner that often is part of its title, of subtitle. Other documentaries need a whole film to explain their point. Those are documentaries that try to explain an event, a theory or a phenomenon. Films that need to use statistics and graphics to prove what they're saying. I've seen several this year, that made me happy I was carrying my notebook so I could write down all the numbers to remember later.

Inside Job talks about the financial crisis, and mainly the road towards it. It's about how in the Eighties under the Reagan government and its policy to deregulate, American banks could start making a profit. It's about the greed that followed and how that greed caused the terrible situation of this era. Banks could turn loans into CDOs (Collateral Debt Obligations) that were sold to other investers, who got rating agencies to give these loans a tripple A status. AIG traded in Credit Default Swaps, insurance that would give the banks back their money, if a CDO would lose it's value. But, even if you didn't have a CDO yourself, you could buy the CDS of AIG, and earn money if others would lose money. More shocking is that not only the FBI but also the Federal Reserve knew all of this and deliberately helped keeping in keeping this policy. In the end, we saw on television the suited men who were attacked on the streets, but who, in the meantime, earned billions of dollars and got away with bonusses. Many of them now work at their new well payed jobs at Harvard, Columbia, or for the Obama administration, where they included a special clausule that says that they can perform other jobs - like consultancy - without losing their salary.

In American Coup, the story is told about the coup that America comitted in Iran in 1953. The democratic elected president Mossadeq decided that the British Oil Company, who owned all the Iranian oil wasn't the actual owner of the oil and that they aquired these right under the wrong, colonial, circumstances and therefor they were illegal. England accused Iran of breeching the contract and first stopped all ships that tried to collect Iranian oil. Eventually they asked the help of president Eisenhower, who send Kermit Roosenveld (grand son of the former president) to Iran. His job was to create chaos, by bribing several people, by pushing different groups to fight eachother and to seduce the press to discribe Mossadeq as a communist. After receiving five million dollar of the CIA, the shah returned to Iran and gave the British and their company BP back their rights to use the Iranian oil. One of the interviewees wonders at the end of the film how Iran and the whole region would have looked like, if Iran would have been a democratic country all that time.

Freakonomics is based on the famous book, and shows in simular ways in a quick and funny way how:
a) your name has no influence on your future. You background, upbringing, the neighbourhood you lived in, they do. And those, or at least you parents ones, influence the name you get.
b) you can find patterns everywhere, and economists can retrace everything, based on them.
c) the reduction of crime rates in NY aren't connected to the strict policy of Giuliani, but primarily with a new abortion law that was installed fifteen years earlier, that reduced the rate of unwanted childbirth in the poorer areas.
d) how everyone reacts on incentives that encourage a certain behaviour.
In other words: bring a notebook. So if you end up in a discussion later, you can use all the new knowledge you just gained (if your memory fails as mine does).