Into the heart of consumerist hell

It’s important to educate. I’m a filmmaker, but also a bit of a troublemaker in that sense. It is important to put America’s individual debt on the agenda — at the moment, the war in Iraq is dominating the agenda — and to try to help people,” says Danny Schechter, director of the documentary In Debt We Trust, which analyses and examines the deeper roots of the United States’s total consumer debt, which is estimated at about $3-trillion.

Schechter’s film is part of the Poverty and Inequality Challenge programme at the 28th Durban International Film Festival and, along with the seditious What Would Jesus Buy?, does not focus on the usual themes of developing economies being affected by structural adjustment programmes or free- market hypocrisies. Instead, the cameras move away from emaciated African children and into the heart of consumerist hell: the United States. A country where credit-card companies pervade and, judging by an absurd scene in In Debt We Trust, even dead labradors can be solicited through the mail with plastic enticements; where, in the Christmas shopping frenzy, one retailer interviewed in What Would Jesus Buy? says: “I had a woman cuss me out and spit on me because I didn’t have a PS3 [Playstation 3] for her grandchild.”

Schechter says there is little space in a mainstream American media dominated by reports of bullish economies and Paris Hilton’s prison diaries for the issue of an economy “based two-thirds on consumption” and “teetering on the brink of financial disaster” to be properly addressed. He hopes his film will address this situation. There is, admittedly, some misanthropic joy to be had in imagining the economic implosion of the US. Yet Schechter’s film leaves no space for flippancy as it analyses credit-card marketing campaigns, the role of lobby groups in Washington and the debt fallout, including the two million American families facing foreclosures on their homes.

The dangerous universality of the content is inescapable. Schechter has links to South Africa, which go back to 1967 when he arrived to cover Chief Albert Luthuli’s funeral as a 24-year-old journalist. He has since directed several documentaries on the country, including Countdown to Freedom: Ten Days that Changed South Africa (1994), and produced the long-running South Africa Now current affairs television programme. A media analyst and activist, his interest in South Africa remains avid, and we are soon discussing Finance Minister Trevor Manuel’s warning to consumers on their profligate use of credit.

“South Africa is one of the more advanced developing countries and there is already a move towards consumption while production is also being outsourced there,” says Schechter.

“It is happening all over the world where the media is so pervasive. People want what other people have and with credit cards you become unaware that you will eventually have to pay for it.

“My point in this film is that this bubble in the US is about to burst and that we are in a very fragile situation. It is a horrendous situation as the gap between the rich and the poor widens in the US,” says Schechter.

While In Debt We Trust analyses the cold, hard reality of American debt, director Rob van Alkemade’s What Would Jesus Buy? is an absurdist guerrilla attack on the US’s malls and consumerist culture that spoofs Christian evangelicalism.

Tracking the Reverend Billy and his Stop Shopping Gospel Choir on their mission across the US to spread their anti- consumerism doctrine in the month leading up to Christmas, it is as hilarious as it is horrific: in one scene, as the choir trundles along on its bus, the voice-over from a radio news broadcast describes one of the first recipients of a PS3 in the US to be very excited about the purchase, this “despite coughing up blood because of a shotgun chest wound”. The consumer still “motioned to shop assistants to reach into his pocket for his wallet to pay for the gift”.

With de rigueur peroxide blonde hair and peeping dark roots, Reverend Billy exorcises consumer demons from people and delivers rousing sermons against “Mickey Mouse the Antichrist” while his 30-strong choir and seven-piece band subvert Christmas carols in the face of the “Shopocalypse”. The film also examines the sociological effects large chain stores have on the fabric of small-town US, the reliance of multinationals on sweatshop production and its consequences, the mythologising of Christmas and its psychological evolution into a consumerist holiday.

What Would Jesus Buy? is currently working the film festival circuit in the US and Van Alkemade has, surprisingly, been getting good feedback from Christian groups “once they get past the initial red flags”. Of the consumerist nightmare that has replaced the American dream, Van Alkemade says: “It’s clearly an addiction. I’ve suffered in the past and got into trouble before while I was at school, or borrowing money for school. Credit helps us manifest our genetic orders to be reckless and that works perfectly for credit- card companies,” says the 36-year-old, who admits to about $100 000 worth of debt, most from student loans.

The details

The Poverty and Inequality Challenge Film Festival will screen the following features: Bamako by Abderrahmane Sissako; Dreams of Dust by Laurent Salgues; Antonia by Tata Amaral; Suely in the Sky by Karim Aïnouz; Bog of Beasts by Claudio Assis; On the Wings of Dreams by Golam Biplob Rabany; and Sounds of Sand (Si Le Vent Souleve Les Sables) by Marion Hansel.

Documentaries include In Debt We Trust: America before the Bubble Burst by Danny Schechter; El Ejido, the Law of Profit by Rhalib Jawad; What Would Jesus Buy? by Rob van Alkemade; Damned by Debt Relief by Ceri Dingle; The Struggle for Livelihood in Mining Communities by Sebastian Böhm and Vivian Schüler; and A World without Water by Brian Woods.

Screenings will take place at Nu Metro Cinecentre Suncoast from June 27 to 30 and throughout the Durban International Film Festival, which runs from June 20 July 1 at various centres in Durban. For more information,

or Tel: 031 260 2506.