
Money for Free
Basic income experiments are spreading in places where the old social security model looks stuck, and this film follows the people running them. Michael Bohmeyer, a German IT entrepreneur, quit his own company after realizing what removing financial stress had done for him, then built a crowdfunding platform that pays one person 1,000 euros a month for a year once donors raise 12,000 euros; eight people have received it so far. Economist Guy Standing describes his own trial in India, where 6,000 people received unconditional cash for eighteen months, and argues that conventional welfare and income tax systems are failing the people they're meant to protect. Groningen alderman Matthias Gijsbertsen and New York venture investor Albert Wenger add the view from local government and private capital, both weighing whether handing out money with no conditions attached actually works better than managing it centrally. The film moves between Berlin, Groningen, London, and India, treating each experiment as a small-scale test of a much larger question: what happens to work, security, and ambition when survival stops being conditional.