The Bull Laid Bear
In their second collaborative film, Oliver Ressler and Zanny Begg focus on the financial and economic crisis after 2008. ‘The Bull Laid Bear’ lays bare the economic recession (bear market) that hides behind each boom time (bull market).
The film pokes fun at the slippery justifications made for the bailouts and austerity packages by exploring how governments in the United States, and other countries such as Ireland, turned a banking crisis into a budgetary crisis at the governmental level.
The film is structured around a series of interviews with US economists and activists, such as William K. Black, a white-collar criminologist, Yves Smith, the author of the ‘Naked Capitalism’-blog, Tiffiniy Cheng, campaign coordinator for A New Way Forward, and Gerald Epstein, the co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute. The gathered material has been blended with hand-drawn animations to create a quasi-fictitious criminal world of gangster bankers and corrupt courts. Performer Singing Sadie provides the soundtrack with a reinterpretation of ‘God Bless the Child’, Billie Holiday’s classic lament on money.
‘The Bull Laid Bear’ probes our collective ‘belief’ in financial markets, unravelling responsibility for the 2008 financial meltdown and looking at some of the causes of the economic crisis in Europe.
