Oliver Ressler - SOCIALISM FAILED, CAPITALISM IS BANKRUPT. WHAT COMES NEXT?

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.