Generation Wealth - Documentary

[wilder]

A documentary that investigates the pathologies that have created the richest society the world has ever seen.

Directed by Lauren Greenfield (The Queen of Versailles)
Release Date - July 20, 2018


The trailer is sketchy but Greenfield is a talented photographer and has proven herself a pretty decent filmmaker in the past (Thin, Magic City). Here's a quote from a video lecture by her posted last year in the book thread, when her photography book by the same name was released.

Over the past four years, I've been engaged not only in the process of making new work and photographs and a video for this project, but most importantly, in a process of analyzing and investigating my own work, thinking about what I've been witness to over the past 25 years. But this project is not about actual wealth. To clarify, it's really about the influence of affluence. It's about our aspiration to wealth, its connection to our identity, and that of the American Dream, and the way we emulate it, and package it, and export our notions of it, and the contagious virus that is the addictive culture of consumerism. My work considers wealth very broadly defined: so I'm including the currency of fame, the currency of branding, the currency of the body, the currency of youth...

I realized that this wasn't just the time that I worked and the themes that I followed, but actually there was this kind of seismic shift in both our values and our culture...and saw that we had gone from a culture defined by the Protestant ethic and the value of hard work and discipline and frugality...to a culture that prized bling, and celebrity, and narcissism.