THE END OF POVERTY? We're not even close according to Philippe Diaz's searing new documentary.

By Terry Keefe

(This article is currently appearing in this month's Venice Magazine.)

And now we pause for some startling statistics: 20% of the planet's population uses 80% of its resources…and consumes 30% more than the planet can regenerate.

Those numbers are at the heart of filmmaker Philippe Diaz’s documentary, The End of Poverty?, which sets out to examine the actual root causes of global poverty, and the film is the antithesis of a feel-good capitalism love story. A major part of Diaz’s conclusion is that capitalism doesn’t work without free, or at least very cheap, labor. His argument follows that the conquest of poorer countries in the South, by wealthier ones in the North, began with slavery and colonization hundreds of years ago, but continues today, even though many of those countries technically now have their independence. According to the theories laid out in the film, servitude comes now in a different form, metaphorical chains and shackles, via wildly unfair debt, tax, and trade policies. And for the wealthier nations to maintain their current standards of living and consumption, the poorer ones must continue to suffer, with little hope for that changing any time soon.

Diaz frames the backbone of The End of Poverty upon a series of interviews with both economic experts and citizens of a number of impoverished countries.

How large was the crew you traveled with to do your interviews with the documentary subjects in the poorer areas?

Philippe Diaz: We were a very small team and that was for two reasons. There is the budget issue of course, but also, we knew that because we had to go into small places, where poor people live. A lot of these people live in a room which is eight by eight feet. And sometimes there is an entire family living in it. I was operating the camera as well as directing and the producer was also doing the sound, and we had two local people to help.

(Filmmaker Philippe Diaz, above.)

You did a tremendous amount of research before shooting anything, but did you still encounter a number of surprises in your actual interviews?

There are good surprises and bad ones. The bad ones were the reactions of some experts. We wanted to raise awareness of the true causes of poverty with the film, as you know. My biggest surprise is that when I went to interview some of these experts, they had nothing interesting to say. There’s the story of (American economist) Jeffery Sachs going around the world with Bono and saying if we give mosquito nets and fertilizer, it will end poverty. I went to interview the number two of Jeffery Sachs, and after an hour and a half of interview, he could only tell me about mosquito nets and fertilizer. But some of the poor people who we interviewed…we were very surprised by their understanding of world economy and world poverty. They were very aware that they are poor because we are rich.

Structurally, the film predominantly focuses on making its case about the causes of poverty. Earlier on in the production, had you considered spending more time with proponents of the other side of this debate, those who believe that unfettered capitalism will set the world free?

I started with that idea. I wanted to show both sides. We interviewed lots of experts from around the world, but what they were saying…they couldn’t even articulate their ideas. It was their idea and that was it. If you tried to dig, there was nothing there. We had so little time to explain the problem, that to show the other side was a total waste. But I didn’t want to make a leftist movie, because that isn’t the issue. The issue is, as surmised by one of the experts who said, “Today we are consuming 30 percent more than what the planet can regenerate.” So, because the world population increases every year, it means that in order for us in the north to maintain our great lifestyle, we have to plunge more and more people below the poverty line. That’s not a political issue, that’s a mathematical issue. As one other expert says, “If we could find six other planets with the same resources, it wouldn’t be a problem.” I think it’s a crisis much bigger than global warming. It’s a problem of a much bigger proportion. How many million people will we let die every year so we can keep three cars in the garage?