Poverty, Inc.
Winner of over 60 international film festival honors, the $100,000 Templeton Freedom Award, and the €5,000 Best Documentary Award from the FIFE Environmental Film Festival in Paris.
“I see multiple colonial governors,” says Ghanaian software entrepreneur Herman Chinery-Hesse of the international development establishment in Africa. “We are held captive by the donor community.”
The West has positioned itself as the protagonist of development, giving rise to a vast multi-billion dollar poverty industry — the business of doing good has never been better.
Yet the results have been mixed, in some cases even catastrophic, and leaders in the developing world are growing increasingly vocal in calling for change.
Poverty Inc. is a film that critically examines the current model of development of foreign aid, NGOs and private charity to social entrepreneurs and celebrity campaigns. Drawing on perspectives gathered from 200 interviews, Poverty Inc looks at some of the hidden and negative effects of the current “poverty industry.”
Drawing from over 200 interviews filmed in 20 countries, Poverty, Inc. unearths an uncomfortable side of charity we can no longer ignore.
From TOMs Shoes to international adoptions, from solar panels to U.S. agricultural subsidies, the film challenges each of us to ask the tough question: Could I be part of the problem?
