Payback

Margaret Atwood's brilliant 2008 essay, "Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth" is the jumping off point for this fascinating, far-ranging cinematic essay by Jennifer Baichwal, who previously gave us MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES, a journey into the hellish beauty of Chinese environmental disaster. Here the filmmaker, working from Atwood's premise, explores the multifaceted notion of debt: financial, economic, moral and spiritual. She visits with both sides in a contemporary Albanian blood feud, involving automatic weaponry; with Conrad Black, the disgraced media mogul, imprisoned for mail fraud; with environmentalists who describe the degree of responsibility BP has taken (not enough) for the Gulf oil spill; and with Florida tomato growers who ultimately reconcile with their workers over improving working conditions. But PAYBACK is no dry academic treatise on conscience. In riveting, literate passages from her writing, Atwood focuses on the urgent issue of the debt we each owe to the larger social good.

CRITICAL NOTES

"Payback is nothing if not brave." - Rick Groen, The Globe and Mail

Director: Jennifer Baichwal
Cast:
Year: 2012
Runtime: 82 minutes
Country: Canada
Language: English
Distributor: Mongrel Media


Ratings: ON NR / BC NR / AB NR / SK NR / MB NR / QC NR / Maritmes NR

SCREENING DATES 

Date	Circuit Centre	Location

This film has no active screening dates.