Oliver Ressler - SOCIALISM FAILED, CAPITALISM IS BANKRUPT. WHAT COMES NEXT? & WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO WIN?

SOCIALISM FAILED, CAPITALISM IS BANKRUPT. WHAT COMES NEXT?
Year: 2010
Director: Oliver Ressler
Lenght: 19 minutes
Language:English & German
Subtitles: Chinese

Ressler’s recent film “Socialism Failed, Capitalism is Bankrupt. What comes Next?” focuses on the political and economic situation in the Republic of Armenia, one of the successor states of the Soviet Union. The film was recorded in summer 2010 in Yerevan’s largest bazaar, called “Bangladesh”. Every day more than 1000 people try to survive as traders in the “Bangladesh” bazaar, where an average vendor does not earn more than 100 to 250 Euros per month. In the film, the market’s trad- ers talk about their struggles to survive during crises in a post-socialist state that closed most Soviet-era factories and dissolved social safety nets. The market’s traders, primarily former factory-workers, describe how their living conditions worsened after the end of the Soviet Union; they speak about their hopes and expectations for social change. While they live in misery, a small but highly influential class of corrupt politicians and super- rich oligarchs team up with international corporations in order to fill their pockets with profits from transferring state property and licenses for mining.

WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO WIN?

Year: 2008
Director: Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler
Lenght: 41 minutes
Language: English
Subtitles: German

WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO WIN? was filmed on the blockades at the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany in June 2007. In their first collaborative film Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler focus on the current state of the counter-globalization movement in a project which grows out of both artists’ preoccupation with globalization and its discontents. The film, which combines documentary footage, interviews, and animation sequences, is structured around three questions pertinent to the movement: Who are we? What is our power? What would it mean to win?