Generation Wealth

This is surely one of the most important stories we can be telling about the way we live now- the relentless pursuit for wealth and fame that obsesses up so many us. Celebrated photo journalist Lauren Greenfield brings her unique eye to bear on over twenty years of excess. The stories she focuses on are both appalling and touching. Greenfield looks at the wealthy LA teens of the 90s including a young Kim Kardashian and talks to the extraordinary disgraced hedge fund manager Florian Homm, a former porn star and most heartbreakingly of all a neglectful mother obsessed with plastic surgery. It's an idiosyncratic documentary about the pursuit of money as an inadequate sticking plaster over the pervading wounds of scarcity and lack we feel in a secular, fame obsessed society. Greenfield seems to acknowledge her own unreliability as a narrator by turning the camera on herself and her family and documenting her own absences from them as she relentlessly pursued her subjects over the years. It makes for an uneven narrative and a story without easy conclusions. But it felt truthful to me because of it. We're all in this mess together and we are all voyeurs.