Money: Who Creates It? Who Controls It?

Below is a brief description of the video "MONEY - Who Creates It? Who Controls It?" by Issac Isitan. 

"Two years ago, Turkish-born Canadian director Isaac Isitan watched from the comfort of his living room as thousands of people in Turkey and Argentina took to the streets, attacking the banks when their life savings evaporated overnight. Middle-class people who once lined up at the bank were now lining up at food banks. How could these relatively wealthy countries possibly go bankrupt in less than a decade? With this question in mind, Isitan takes us to Turkey, Argentina and the US in a moving portrait of citizens who have lost everything. Interwoven with these stories, a lucid essay dissects the macro-economic policies, demanded by the World Bank and the IMF, that have plunged entire nations into economic crisis. Faced with a lack of money, the people have begun to reinvent it, initiating credit and barter systems, and inventing local parallel economies. An essential and incisive look into the hidden side of money."

This film documentary can be viewed at this website:

http://www.hotdocslibrary.ca/en/detail.cfm?filmId=5278

The information below is printed on the jacket of the original VHS video:

Money makes the world go round. But where does money come from? How is it created? How does it run out?

Filmed in Argentina and in Turkey at a time when both countries are going through the worst financial crisis in their history, the film exposes the root causes of the crisis. It looks at how structural adjustment programs, imposed by the International Monetary Fund, have destroyed the two countries' economies, tapping their resources for foreign interests and gutting the value of their national currency.

Money is the blood of the economy and the basis of exchange. Deprived of money, Argentinians have a revolutionary idea and create their own currency. For them, it is a question of survival.

This phenomenon is not limited to countries in crisis. There are over 3000 barter networks for goods and services based on local currency. In the heart of the United States, in Ithaca (NY), the director met with a community for whom the local currency is the expression of their political will to support anddevelop local exchange at a time when capital so easily crosses borders.

Script, direction and research: Isaac Isitan 
Camera: Isaac Isitan, Tolga Kutluay, Michel Desroches, Kerem Saltuk 
Sound: Isaac Isitan, Pierre.Paul Martin 
Editing: Isabelle Massicotte, Carole Poliquin, Diego Briceno-Orduz 
Original Soundtrack: Roberto Lopez 
Text: Carole Poliquin 
Line Producer: Gunu-Helene Isitan, Veronique Saurjol 
Produced By: CarolePoliquin, Isaac Isitan

Produced with the financial participation of: SODEC /Quebec Film and Television Tax Credit /Canadian Fund for Independent Film and Video /Rogers Documentary Fund /Conseil des arts etlettres du Quebec /Canada Council for the Arts/Canadian Film and Video Production Tax Credit Program /in collaboration with TVS Quebec Canada (www.tv5.ca)

© Les productions ISCA inc., 2003, 65 minutes, color, Canada.