Profit and nothing but!

This documentary is part of a collection of 8 films entitled 'Your money or your life!' dealing with the issues of politics and money. Starting from the generally accepted hypothesis that 'it's the search for profit that makes the world go round', the filmmaker Raoul Peck explores in this documetary essay the consequences of this paradigm for human relations within contemporary society. What does the world look like from Port-à-Piment, a small town in Haïti, today left in ruin and victim of severe social destructuring. These are the questions asked by the director: how do the rich and poor cohabit, what about the idea of solidarity, major ideologies, the new economy, social dislocation, ecology, memory, the role of cinema? With a series of questions, like a manifesto composed on a jazz score, Raoul Peck builds a polyphonic film where daily life, archives, interviews of economists, graphics, vox pops merge and intertwine. Punctuated by the director's own commentary and marked by brutally stylised camerawork, the film alternates between a macro perspective - that of international speculation, globalisation and economic experts - and a micro approach, that of the fishermen and peasants of Port-à-Piment who are forced to reinvent a new system of trade by barter. In the style of an ironic, and also poetice, fable, the director tells us the current story of the rich and the poor. 'Profit and Nothing But!' is the director's 7th documentary essay.