On January 11th, 2008, hired by the City of Cleveland, lawyer Josh Cohen and his team filed a lawsuit against 21 banks, which they held accountable for the wave of foreclosures that had left their city in ruins. Since then, the bankers on Wall Street have been fighting by with all available means to avoid going to court… The film is the story of that trial. A film about a trial that may never be held but in which the facts, the participants and their testimonies are all real: the judge, lawyers, witnesses, even the members of the jury – asked to give their verdict – play their own roles. Step by step, one witness after another, the film takes apart, from a plain, human perspective, the mechanisms of subprime mortgage loans, a system that sent the world economy reeling. A trial for the sake of example, a universal fable about capitalism.

Jean-Stéphane Bron

Born in Lausanne in 1969, Jean-Stéphane Bron is a documentarian. His movies received several distinctions in Europe and in the US, like Connu de nos services (1997), about a scandal of files compiled by Swiss Federal Police. Le Génie helvétique (Mais Im Bundeshuus) (2003), one of the biggest success of Swiss film, or L’Expérience Blocher, portrait of the right-wing populist leader Christophe Blocher, which stirred up controversy. With Cleveland against Wall Street (2010), about the subprime crisis, which is presented in Cannes and nominated for a Cesar, he gains international recognition and receives for the second time the Quartz of Best documentary at the Swiss Film Award. His last movie, The Paris Opera (2017), about Paris Opera’s backstage, is widely distributed around the world.