JENNIFER BAICHWAL, “PAYBACK”

Added by No Author on April 27, 2012.
Saved under Film and Screen

Jennifer Baichwal is an accomplished Canadian filmmaker whose ever-searching documentaries have taken up such diverse subjects as photography (The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia), literary biography (Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles), the metaphysics of lightning strikes (Act of God), and the devastating underside of mass Western consumption (Manufactured Landscapes). In her latest film, Payback, loosely based on the prolific Booker Prize–winning author Margaret Atwood’s book-length study of debt as a structuring principle of life, language, and contemporary culture (the subtitle for her tome is The Shadow Side of Wealth), Baichwal investigates the disparate ways in which the idea of indebtedness…