Isaac Isitan

L’argent/Money
2003, 65 min

Isaac Isitan explores processes of change within corrupt power systems as well as opposing models of self organised cooperatives that reinvent local economies and install parallel markets. Isitan analyses financial- and power-political structures and shows new possibilities of redistribution as a reaction of the breakdown of the financial system in Argentina.

A film about the effects of the bank crash in Turkey and Argentina (2002 and 2003). Life savings became worthless overnight. Middle-class citizens who once queued at the bank counter now do so at Salvation Army soup-kitchens. How is it possible that a relatively prosperous country can go bankrupt within a single decade? Bearing in mind this question, Isitan travelled through Turkey, Argentina, and the USA to portray people who had lost everything. The film incorporates an analysis of the macro-economy guidelines which, supported by the World Bank and the IMF, have plunged whole nations into a state of crisis. Confronted with the loss of their money, local communities began to introduce their own currencies in order to restore the value of work and products. With the aid of parallel money, labour and trade markets, new systems of distribution were established to enable survival.
Against the background of the ongoing financial crises the consequences of the present international bank crash have achieved enormous measures, concussing the complete global economy. Not only the world bank and the IWF are acting in an exploitative, speculative and a ruthless way regarding the so called emerging markets, but also the international banking system has achieved a transfer of polical power to a speculative financing market system, by having instiutionalized the deregulation of the global financial markets.