Good Screenings

Corporations: The Yes Men Fix the World

Directed by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno

• Berlin Panorama - Audience Award
• Grierson Award - Best Feature Documentary 2009

Synopsis

A screwball true story about two gonzo political activists who, posing as top executives of giant corporations, lie their way into big business conferences and pull off the world's most outrageous pranks.

About the director

Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno

According to wikipedia.. The Yes Men are a group of culture jamming activists who practice what they call "identity correction" by pretending to be powerful people and spokespersons for prominent organizations. From their offices in Milwaukee, they create and maintain fake websites similar to ones they want to spoof, and then they accept invitations received on their websites to appear at conferences, symposia, and TV shows. They express the idea that corporations and governmental organizations often act in dehumanizing ways toward the public.

• "Outrageously entertaining....This movie is glorious testimony to the moral power of satire." — New York Magazine
• "Great fun! It takes some nerve, not to mention diabolical intelligence... to pull off the elaborate pranks devised by the Yes Men." — New York Times
• "Fiendishly amusing... Out-Borats Sacha Baron Cohen at his most confrontational."—Washington Post
• "A hilarious movie.... Even if you don't agree with the Yes Men's political agenda, you'll get a big kick out of this movie." — New York Post
• "Almost too good to be a film. More laughs per dollar than any other film fuel." — Monsters and Critics
• "It shines with raw wit and originality." — Newsweek

• Offical website
• Play the Yes Men Game
• The Bhopal Campaign
• Film guide to download

More Information

From New Orleans to India to New York City, armed with little more than cheap thrift-store suits, the Yes Men squeeze raucous comedy out of all the ways that corporate greed is destroying the planet.

Armed with nothing but thrift-store suits, the Yes Men lie their way into business conferences and parody their corporate targets in ever more extreme ways - basically doing everything that they can to wake up their audiences to the danger of letting greed run our world.

One day Andy, purporting to be a Dow Chemical spokesperson, gets on the biggest TV news program in the world and announces that Dow will finally clean up the site of the largest industrial accident in history, the Bhopal catastrophe. The result: as people worldwide celebrate, Dow's stock value loses two billion dollars. People want Dow to do the right thing, but the market decides that it can't.

The reality hits Andy and Mike like a ton of bricks: we have created a market system that makes doing the right thing impossible, and the people who appear to be leading are actually following its pathological dictates. If we keep putting the market in the driver's seat, it could happily drive the whole planet off a cliff.

At conference after conference, the Yes Men try to wake up their corporate audiences to this frightening prospect, in the process taking on some of the world's biggest and baddest corporations. Just one example: as Exxon, Andy and Mike demonstrate a new biofuel made from climate-change victims. It's a gut-busting laugh riot - one of several in the film - to see the unsuspecting audience learn that the lit candles they hold are made out of dead people.

On their journey, the Yes Men act as gonzo journalists, delving deep into the question of why we have given the market more power than any other institution to determine our direction as a society. They visit the twisted (and accidentally hilarious) underworld of the free-market think tanks, where they figure out a way to defeat the logic that's destroying our planet. And as they appear on the BBC before 300 million viewers, or before 1000 New Orleans contractors alongside Mayor Ray Nagin, the layers of lies are peeled back to reveal the raw heart of truth - a truth that brings with it hope.

Hope explodes at the end of this film with a power that may take audiences straight out of the theater and into the barricades. A word of warning to theater owners: make sure your seats are securely screwed down.

Bonus: This film has one of the very few underwater ballet scenes you will ever see in a political documentary!

This film is dedicated to the ongoing struggle of the people of Bhopal to achieve a crucial global precedent.

Please visit http://www.bhopal.net and contribute whatever you can - your money, your talents, your time.

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