
Us & Them: Why the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Poorer
Inequality gets a human face through four people on opposite sides of it. In London, socialite Liz insists that success is available to anyone willing to work for it, while Jamie, unemployed since a serious car accident, relies on food banks and cannot find work that covers his rent, one of an estimated 14 million people living in poverty in a country counted among the world's richest. In Soweto, self-made millionaire Sakhumzi runs several businesses employing hundreds of local workers, while Princess, a mother of four, cannot land steady work or pay her daughter's school fees, and dreams of one day getting her family under a single roof. South Africa's unemployment rate sits near 30 percent, among the highest in the world. The film cuts between these paired lives without editorializing, letting Liz's and Sakhumzi's belief in capitalism sit directly against Jamie's and Princess's daily arithmetic of survival, and closing on the wider costs inequality imposes on communities and economies.