American Casino
The documentary film American Casino reveals the insidiousness that fueled the housing crisis and the subprime mortgage debacle. Through the heart-aching personal losses of a high school teacher, a therapist, and a minister—the kind of people most of us wish we had as neighbors-- the seasoned filmmakers William and Leslie Cockburn decode the byzantine world of Wall Street securities and how it gambled away $12 trillion of other people’s money, their dreams and futures, like red and black chips at a Las Vegas poker table. The Cockburns’ simple but poignant film reveals how subprime loans capsized American cities, most notably Baltimore and Stockton, CA—and particularly African Americans —in much the same fashion as the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina left much of New Orleans underwater and homeless. The housing crisis has reinvented the word underwater, with one million Americans losing their homes to foreclosure in 2008 and another 7 million projected to lose their homes over the next three years -- most submerged under family debt and personal grief. One former homeowner laments, “When you lose your home, you lose your identity, your friends, a feeling of safety, church, neighbors – it destroys you and your community.” |