American Casino documentary film trailer
Sunday, September 13th, 2009
Politicians and the media like to talk about the relationship between Wall Street and Main Street, but investigative journalist Leslie burns debut feature gets to the guts of the matter, visiting defectors from Bear Stearns and Standard & Poors and other high-level players in the subprime mortgage gamble (not to mention Bloomberg’s Mark Pittman, America’s finest financial reporter) and, on the flipside, visiting the working-class Americans who were the unwitting chips on the table. Unique in coverage of the financial fiasco that is ruining us all, American Casino tracks the fate of a subprime borrower enmeshed in a Goldman-Sachs mortgage bond, catches Alan Greenspan in his most abject moment of self justification, and takes to the post-apocalyptic world of California’s Riverside County, where millions of disease-bearing mosquitoes are breeding in the stagnant swimming pools of the foreclosed American dream. All this musically underscored by the irony and pathos of Moby, the caustic humor of Herbie Hancock, Bruce Springsteen’s haunting evocation of the last great depression, as well as astonishing hip hop tracks from the streets of Baltimore.
Official selection Tribeca Film Fetival 2009
For more information visit www.americancasinothemovie.com
It is rare that a documentary director has the privilege to shoot a film that, while in production, becomes the greatest story of our time. The worst case scenario of January 2008, when we began work on American Casino, turned into reality in the year that followed. We were able to follow our characters through Wall Streets collapse, foreclosure, bankruptcy, homelessness. We watched whole neighborhoods ravaged by the subprime meltdown. I have spent much of my career filming in war zones and post apocalyptic societies — Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan. But I never expected such a disaster at home. To be there, with a camera, while it was happening, telling the story, was certainly the highlight of my career.
— Leslie burn, Director
Duration : 0:2:44
“We’re literally stuck up a cul-de-sac in a cement SUV without a fill-up” - James Howard Kunstler