The Panama Papers – Alex Winter

nel 2018, un anno prima del film di Steven Soderbergh, Alex Winter girò un documentariosulla storia dei Panama Papers.

a partire da un whistleblower, schifato da ciò che sapeva, una serie di giornalisti e giornali, che nel 2017 vinsero il premio Pulitzer per la loro inchiesta, pubblicò le informazioni di John Doe sui riccastri che in patria predicavano ai poveri i valori patriottici, e intanto mettevano i loro soldi nei paradisi fiscali, senza pagare le tasse nei loro paesi.

la solita storia schifosa, la soluzione sarebbe l'esproprio totale delle ricchezze di quei riccastri di merda, ma quello che si fa è rendere quei comportamenti sempre più legali, insomma lo schifo dello schifo.

vedere il documentario insegna, è un thriller criminal-finanziario, non adatto ai deboli di stomaco,potrebbero vomitare l'anima per l'incazzo e il senso d'impotenza che circonda queste storie, ma con qualche pastiglietta è un film che serve a tutti.

buona (criminal-finanziaria) visione - Ismaele

 

 

 

 

 

…The film opens with Bastian Obermayer, an investigative reporter for the Munich-based newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, explaining how he was contacted in 2015 by a digital whistleblower. The whistleblower, who claimed to have no links to any government or intelligence agency, called himself John Doe and was looking to expose a data archive of 11.5 million documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The firm represented dozens of figures from 200 countries, including presidents and princes. A few of its clients: Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria; Nawaz Sharif, the president of Pakistan; Vladimir Putin; Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, the prime minister of Iceland; David Cameron Mitchell, the prime minister of Britain; and Donald Trump…

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…Although The Panama Papers occasionally treads the line of Wikipediitis, what The Guardian’s Charles Bramesco posits as the malady afflicting info-dump documentaries that might be better served as articles than as movies, Winter builds upon the information overload of the film’s first act to find a rousing story of heroic journalism in the age of #fakenews. The doc delivers the facts beginning with the contact between an anonymous informant who leaked documents to German journalist Bastian Obermayer detailing jaw-dropping accounts of tax evasion and fraud channelling through Panamanian corporate service provider Mossack Fonesca. Obermayer recounts to Winter his experience of wrestling with this information that featured names implicating world leaders like Vladimir Putin and Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, just to name a few. The scope of the scandal and its fallout are too much for one journalist, or even documentary, to relate—thankfully a critic can simply link to the Wikipedia pag when a film simply cannot—and Obermayer recognizes that the story of the Panama Papers needs more hands…

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The Panama Papers – the story of how a small team of investigative journalists from a German newspaper stumbled across the scoop of a lifetime, and then shared it with hundreds of other reporters worldwide – is compulsive viewing.

As compelling as a police procedural, Alex Winter’s documentary plays like a thriller where the tensions builds slowly but surely to a spate of arrests and the downfall of (some of) the high and mighty exposed in a massive leak of material from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.

This is a film that exposes the multi-billion global business in tax evasion, systematic legal abuses and the corruption of lawyers, bankers and politicians in effecting what the anonymous whistle-blower ‘John Doe’ (whose words are voiced by actor Elijah Wood) says is still called  «capitalism, but it is tantamount to economic slavery.»

The sheer scale of lost tax revenues – more than $200 billion a year in the US and major Western countries alone – helps explain why the past few decades have been so kind to the extremely wealthy, the top 1 per cent of whom now own more than the combined assets of the other 99 per cent.

This is a film that reveals the obscene human cost of the greed and effective theft from the public purse, the poverty and wasted creative potential of billions.

It is a film that should be shown in every favela, shantytown, village, town and city square across the world. It deserves the widest possible release and international television peak time slots.

The Panama Papers also highlights the invaluable role of public service journalism in an age where right-wing forces of darkness are desperately pushing a ‘post-fact’ agenda where ‘truth’ is deemed to no longer have any meaning or value…

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