Synopsis:
A Bangladeshi man dashes through the streets burdened by the crossed shaped advertising signboard he carries on his back; a trader loses his family as a result of his addiction to the financial markets; a chain smoking insurance man tries desperately to escape the city’s daily grind; an aggressive metals trader lives for killing animals at the weekend; a street sweeper on a spiritual quest seeks a life in the wilderness. Marc Isaacs’ latest feature length film shot during the current financial crisis explores the human cost of life in the dog eat dog world of London’s Square Mile.
Festivals
Sheffield Doc/Fest 2009
Press
"Since making the strikingly original film Lift nine years ago, Marc Isaacs has developed into one of the most distinctive documentary makers working today. All his films are beautifully filmed and rich in atmosphere. But much more than that, he has an astounding gift for gaining the trust of his subjects, and filming them in such a way that the audience feels as if it can see into their very souls. Here, he follows a number of people who work in the City of London at the start of the recession. They range from an affluent trader (“If we don’t make money,” he says, “we are – in a very dark Darwinian way – expendable”) to a street cleaner on the path to enlightenment (“It’s all part of my giving back to the community... of my own self-development.”) No one has ever made a film about the City that is so singular, so evocative and so human."
David Chater – The Times
Synopsis:
A Bangladeshi man dashes through the streets burdened by the crossed shaped advertising signboard he carries on his back; a trader loses his family as a result of his addiction to the financial markets; a chain smoking insurance man tries desperately to escape the city’s daily grind; an aggressive metals trader lives for killing animals at the weekend; a street sweeper on a spiritual quest seeks a life in the wilderness. Marc Isaacs’ latest feature length film shot during the current financial crisis explores the human cost of life in the dog eat dog world of London’s Square Mile.