Bank Job

TICKETS

June 25-29

Artist/filmmaker team Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell live in an area plagued by debt – mortgage debt, credit card debt, public debt – which impoverishes families, communities and public services. So they recruit their neighbors to set up a bank in their High Street to print their own currency which they then sell as art works. The plan is to raise money to support the local school and community projects and, more daringly, to buy up over $1 million of the debts of local people. These debts are being sold on the market for a small fraction of their face value.

BANK JOB follows Dan and Hilary as they succeed in their aim, eventually (and spectacularly) blowing up the debt in the shadow of London’s financial district. Along the way, they meet with economists, politicians and anti-debt campaigners in America (including the late anthropologist David Graeber) to discover how debt is created in our economy and ask important questions about how the system of money creation might be altered in society’s favor…not just to the banking system’s benefit.

With wit, insight, and gunpowder, BANK JOB argues that these debts are a result of a monetary system which is impoverishing multitudes by design, and which could be changed. (Daniel Edelstyn & Hilary Powell, 2021, UK, 1:21, NR)