Bank Job

t’s not often that you get an activist documentary that leans hits the spot. The pair present themselves as a quirky young couple, surviving in the low-income London suburb of Walthamstow, who decide to take on financial capital and its profitable system of ‘creditocracy’. They mobilize their own community by setting up a people’s bank that creates its own currency, replacing the face of the Queen with those of community activists and selling the bills to raise cash for the community and to pay off the ‘underperforming’ debts of poverty. The film plays with various cinematic ‘bank heist’ tropes and includes snippets of interviews with critics of the money system such as Ann Pettifor, the late David Graeber and activists from the Occupy movement. is radical hijinks with a serious purpose. Edelstyn and Powell plainly enjoyed making it and the contagion is catching. Not to be missed.