Global Culture

To assert that economists use statistics for the same reason that the military uses body-counts: to dehumanize the victims and make it easy to carry on with the task requires some guts, and this is the kind of language that The Big Sellout is not afraid to use. Of course when you have heavy-weights such as Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, there will be few objections to the validity of the argument.

Directed by Florian Opitz, this documentary about the real consequences of privatization was my favorite at the recent HotDocs. Its biggest accomplishment is to reveal the characters affected by globalization, thus humanizing the problem again. Making it clear that it is not about statistics or economics. It is about the people that have their lives affected in such a way that many of them are robbed of their most essential rights. To do this he recruited a small group of local heroes battling with the consequences of privatization in very different ways: a South African hacking the electrical system to give power to the poorest, an English train driver calling out the mess created by the British government when they privatized the rail system, a Philippine mother struggling to keep his son alive in the middle of a health system falling apart, a group of citizens in Bolivia fighting against privatization of their water. If just a dozen of people had the insight and courage of these individuals in every city, the world would be such a different place.

After an important round of applauses at the festival circuit, the film will have its theatrical debut in Germany and hopefully in other places as well. If you are one of the passionate readers of this blog, do everything you can to see it, even contacting the creators.