Inside Job won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Documentary
While protesters are taking on Wall Street in the United States, the Journalism and Media Studies Centre(JMSC) at The University of Hong Kong screened the thought-provoking documentary Inside Job to its students, helping them better understand what happened with the global economic recession in 2008. Inside Job was the 2010 Academy Award Best Documentary Feature winner.
The screening was attended by students mostly interested in finance and business journalism. “It’s a very persuasive and symbolic documentary. I would recommend it to all students interested in finance,” said Isak Ladegaard, a third-year student at HKU who wants to pursue a career in finance journalism.
“The global economic crisis cost tens of millions of people’s jobs, savings, and their homes. This is how it happened.” Inside Job’s official website displayed these words in red block letters, asserting its goal to expose Wall Street’s “crimes” against society.
Starting off with a gloomy review of Iceland’s economic meltdown, the documentary offers compelling arguments against what it calls Wall Street’s perpetually growing greed and irresponsibility.
The film carefully pieces together a chain of apparently risky and dishonest activities conducted by investment banks, rating agencies, home loan mortgage corporations and government officials. Even college academics are revealed to have received bonuses from authorities to tell blatant lies in their papers.
Inside Job’s website quoted TIME’s movie review saying that if “you are not enraged by the end of the movie, you weren’t paying attention”, but many HKU students who attended the screening did not seem to be surprised by the movie’s bold accusations.
Temily Tianmay, a third-year undergraduate student studying Journalism, said that she was “not angry at all” because everybody is “self-interested”. Liu Yajing, a second-year master candidate studying landscape designing, was also unconvinced. In fact, she thought that despite being portrayed as devils who wrecked havoc in the global economy, the bankers weren’t given a fair chance to defend themselves in the documentary.
An intrigued master candidate of journalism, Jaime Chua, asked after screening who financed the documentary. He was curious to know who were the people “playing against the bad guys”.
Last week, the We Occupy Wall Street protests drew global attention. Professor Ying Chan, the director of JMSC who also attended the documentary screening, mentioned in her recently published article on the Chinese international affairs magazine Yazhou Zhoukan that it took a long time for American media to acknowledge the demonstrations.
Only last Saturday did the picture of arrested protesters on Wall Street make it to front pages on mainstream media in America (the New York Daily Post), according to Chan.
“It won’t be easy,” like the documentary concludes in the end, “but some things are worth fighting for.”
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