Le Prix à Payer
PERSONNAGES PRINCIPAUX
« PASSIONNANT, LIMPIDE, INDISPENSABLE. »
Paris Match
« ESSENTIEL …, SAISISSANT (…) INCONTOURNABLE. COUREZ VOIR CE LONG MÉTRAGE! »
Luc Laporte-Rainville, Ciné-Bulles
« EFFARANT… FASCINANT. »
Danièle Heymann, Marianne
« AVEC SON ÉCRITURE RYTHMÉE ET UNE MISE EN SCENE HAUTE EN COULEUR ET EFFETS DE STYLE INFOGRAPHIQUES, LE FILM RÉUSSIT LA GAGEURE DE NE JAMAIS PERDRE SON SPECTATEUR. »
Christophe Alix, Libération
« LE PRIX A PAYER, STUPEFIANT DOCU CANADIEN COUP DE POING. »
Jean-Jacques Rue, Siné Mensuel
« AVEC UNE CLARTÉ, UNE PRÉCISION ET UNE CONCISION ADMIRABLES, LE PRIX A PAYER MET LE DOIGT BIEN PROFOND DANS LA PLAIE DE LA FRAUDE ET DE L’OPTIMISATION FISCALES. »
Serge Kaganski, Les Inrockuptibles
« À NE MANQUER SOUS AUCUN PRÉTEXTE. »
Michel Abecat, Télérama
« DIGNE D’ INSIDE JOB. »
Sophie Fay, Le Nouvel Observateur
« UNE RÉUSSITE TOTALE (…) ALARMANT MAIS ESSENTIEL. »
Gilles Hérail, Tlc Toute La Culture
« ESSENTIEL. »
A Nous Paris
“CONCISE, ENGROSSING AND OCCASIONALLY INFURIATING….”
Joe Leyden, Variety
“ONE OF THE STRONGEST DOCS OF THE YEAR, ONE THAT’S BOTH TIMELY AND HIGHLY PROVOCATIVE.”
Jason Gorber, Twitchfilm
“ESSENTIAL VIEWING.”
Mark Achbar, Director, Sundance Winning The Corporation
“THE MOST IMPORTANT FILM TO DATE ON THE COMPLEX YET CRITICAL ISSUE OF TAX IN AN ERA OF GLOBALISATION.”
John Christensen, Director, Tax Justice Network
“PRAISE-WORTHY FOR MAKING SENSE OF THE ARCANE SUBJECT OF CORPORATE TAXES.”
Steven Frank, Bloomberg
“SMART, EYE-OPENING AND INCENDIARY….”
Agata Smoluch Del Sorbo, Programmer, Toronto International Film Festival
“ONE OF THE MOST UNSETTLING FILMS I SAW ALL YEAR, AND ONE OF THE SMARTEST.”
Steve Gravestock, Toronto International Film Festival
ONE OF THE MOST UNSETTLING FILMS I SAW ALL YEAR, AND ONE OF THE SMARTEST. Steve GRAVESTOCK, Programmer, Toronto International Film Festival
SMART, EYE-OPENING AND INCENDIARY … A VITAL EXPOSÉ OF THE FLAGRANT ETHICAL BANKRUPTCY ENDEMIC TO MODERN CAPITALISM, THE PRICE WE PAY IS A COMPELLING, COHERENT, AND FORCEFUL CALL TO ACTION. Agata SMOLUCH DEL SORBO, Programmer, Toronto International Film Festival
Festival international du film de Toronto Toronto 2014
Festival international du film de Vancouver 2014
Festival du nouveau cinéma Montréal 2014
TOP TEN du Festival international du film de Toronto 2014
CPH. DOX Copenhagen International Documentary Festival 2014
Vancouver Film Critics Circle Meilleur documentaire canadien, 2015
Belleville Downtown DocFest 2015
Festival du film International de Wakefield 2015
PLANETE+ DOC FILM FESTIVAL Pologne 2015
Salt Spring Film Festival 2015
Victoria Film Festival 2015
Note d'intention
(en anglais seulement)
The Price We Pay. as with other documentaries I share credit on, is concerned with how powerful institutions impact ordinary lives. In the case of the TIFF-selected, Genie-winner The World Is Watching [producer-writer], our focus was foreign news coverage of the 80s Central American peace process; in Bhopal. The Search for Justice [producer-writer] the human impact of a chemical company’s criminal negligence; in the TIFF and Sundance-winner The Corporation [co-wrote narration with director Mark Achbar] the omnivorous corporation; and in critically-acclaimed Surviving Progress [co-director, writer] the ecological impact of Wall Street’s lending practices.
When InformAction’s Nathalie Barton approached me about this project, I was hooked once I realized that taxation is a lens through which we understand power – who has it – who doesn’t – the rules we’re governed by – and whether most people have a hope in hell of getting ahead. Working again with Surviving Progress editor Louis-Martin Paradis and a team of virtuoso Québécois film-making talents, we sought to make an instructive essay-style film that is also a cinematic experience. Our story – told mostly by former insiders now free to speak frankly – is intended to show how the offshoring of the world’s wealth is putting at risk the fruits of 20th century social progress: the middle class and the welfare state.
Western leaders who are vowing to reverse alarming inequality trends fail to acknowledge the extent to which they lack the tools for meaningful action. Since the 80s, the nation state – once guarantor of middle class security – is being reshaped into a “competition” state – whose role is to compete against other states for private investment and jobs – the welfare state be damned.
Further eroding government’s redistributive function is a radical new digital economy. Google, Amazon, Apple and other Internet businesses with the largest computing power succeed by incorporating the “free” labour of hundreds of millions of unpaid users into their value creation chains, bankrupting small and medium-sized companies and driving people into a winner-takes-all informal economy, while shifting offshore their staggering profits.
Gaming the archaic tax system, these corporations along with other virtually state-less multinationals are forcing governments into a race to the fiscal bottom. As public treasuries become less and less able to fund the welfare state, income and wealth inequality is pushed to levels unseen for a century and more".
The film illustrates how the tax haven system originally put in place by City of London bankers in former colonial dependencies as a replacement for the British Empire is today an unregulated “space of money”. Through this space beyond democratic control flows over half the world’s stock of money, multinationals’ profits and vast amounts of private wealth. But as we reveal, this “offshore” world is a legal and accounting fiction. The Caymans and other major tax havens could disappear under the sea without losing their rank as major financial centers. They are artifices that allow their corporate clients to be “citizens of nowhere”. The untaxed trillions of dollars booked here – the so-called “missing” wealth of nations – remains under the control of global finance and big business, which leverages its financial power to dismantle the progressive taxation and social security that once assured rising 20th century equality.
Spurred on by a small band of tax justice campaigners on both sides of the Atlantic, US Congressional and UK parliamentary hearings have exposed massive corporate tax avoidance abuse, and propelled the OECD in 2013 to commit itself to reversing the flow of corporate profits “offshore” and the erosion of public finances. But what some see as a “game changer”, others fear is a charade.
Like the villagers surrounded by Roman Legions in the Asterix The Gaul comic series, today every nation – no matter how large – is outflanked by multinational corporations. None can deal with corporate tax avoidance alone.
As best-selling French academic star Thomas Piketty explains in the film: Only tax cooperation between nations can prevent the disappearance of corporate income taxation in the coming decades.
Other remedies advocated by our interviewees include: adapting tax rules to the novel ways Internet companies create wealth by exploiting their users; and financial transaction [Robin Hood] taxes on the trillions of dollars churning through global financial markets – in what former Wall Street and UK financial insiders we interview say is in large measure “socially useless” investment.
For audiences the take-away of The Price We Pay is this: in a world where corporate and financial wealth no longer has a fixed address, democracy can only be preserved by acting co-operatively beyond borders.
Résumé court
Le Prix à Payer s’inspire du livre La Crise fiscale qui vient de Brigitte Alepin.
La finance offshore alliée aux empires de l’économie numérique gruge dangereusement les fondements de l’État démocratique. Le prix à payer montre comment le réseau complexe de paradis fiscaux créé dans les années ’50 par les banquiers de la City met aujourd’hui plus de la moitié du stock mondial d’argent hors de portée des finances publiques. Ces forces conjuguées redéfinissent l’État-nation, devenu État compétiteur dans une lutte à finir pour attirer investissement et emplois. La course à la baisse des impôts alimente une inégalité des revenus inconnue depuis la grande Dépression, tandis que le poids de l’impôt se reporte sur la classe moyenne et les pauvres. Notre histoire est racontée par d’anciens insiders de la finance et de la technologie qui ont repris leur droit de parole, par des journalistes engagés et par des militants de la justice fiscale. Tous craignent que cet engrenage pousse le monde occidental dans un mur.
Résumé long
Le Prix à Payer s’inspire du livre La Crise fiscale qui vient de Brigitte Alepin.
La finance offshore alliée aux empires de l’économie numérique gruge dangereusement les innovations sociales majeures du 20e siècle. l’impôt progressif, la classe moyenne et le filet de sécurité sociale. Le Prix à Payer montre comment les banquiers de la City de Londres ont créé dans les années ’50 un réseau complexe de paradis fiscaux qui, aujourd’hui, met hors de portée des finances publiques plus de la moitié du stock mondial d’argent. Aujourd’hui ces forces conjuguées redéfinissent l’État-nation, devenu État compétiteur dans une lutte à finir entre pays pour attirer investissement et emplois. La course à la baisse des impôts corporatifs alimente une inégalité des revenus inconnue depuis la grande Dépression, tandis que le poids de l’impôt se reporte sur la classe moyenne et les pauvres. Notre histoire est racontée par un ensemble exceptionnel d’anciens insiders de la finance et de la technologie qui ont repris leur droit de parole, ainsi que par des journalistes engagés et des militants de la justice fiscale. Tous craignent qu’à défaut de solutions globales cet engrenage pousse le monde occidental dans un mur.