GENRE: 50 min TV Documentary
FORMAT: HD 16:9
IDEA, SCRIPT AND DIRECTED BY: Edward Hugh (just decide the content - you direct) and Isabel Andrés
ORIGINS OF THE PROJECT…
The idea of making a documentary about the Spanish economic crisis goes back to a sunny Sunday morning spent at the top of Barcelona's Putxet Park, as macroeconomist and blogger Edward Hugh (61), and documentary maker and producer Isabel Andrés (35), were idling away the morning chatting about their mutual interests in film and economics, looking down over the breathtaking panorama of Barcelona that lay at their feet (see taster).
That was back in 2008, the crisis was still really in its early days, the government were still denying there was even going to be a recession, and while it was obvious to them that the Spanish crisis was going to be one of the major focal points of what later came to be known as the "Great Global Recession", both were, in their differing ways far too busy at the time to put any of the ideas they were discussing into practical form as a feasible "to do" project. Edward was too busy spending long hours work analysing and writing about the crisis as it developed, while Isabel was working away on a documentary for Spanish television about a XIX century revolutionary.
Meanwhile the crisis went from bad to worse, and then from worse to even worse with the result that Edward became an increasingly well-known and respected economist as many of the initial predictions he made about the crisis, turned themselves little by little into reality. In particular, a forecast he made in November 2008 that the Dubai debt problem would rapidly become a European Sovereign funding one in Greece, was not slow in fulfilling itself, as that country became engulfed in a major international crisis in January 2010.
As a result of such analyses, and of his long standing expectation that weaknesses in the way the Euro was set up institutionally would eventually result in a generalised coordination and debt problem Edward moved from being a lowly and humble blogger to become an internationally respected analyst, who's opinions were sought by aspiring national leaders, and by the likes of the IMF. Edward's analyses suddenly became fashionable, and he is now frequently consulted by media and by economic analysts from around the world. In fact, he has suddenly become something of a media personality following the publication of a full page story about his work in the pages of the New York Times.
Meanwhile Isabel found herself having to move to Rome, since while Edward flourished on the back of the crisis, Isabel became one of its early victims, as funding in Spain suddenly started to dry up, leading to serious cut backs in the media industry. New films and documentaries were especially hard hit, leaving lots of highly skilled professionals forced to look for work elsewhere. So off she moved to Italy where she worked in a film school while continuing to work on scripts and other film projects.
Fast forward two years, the crisis is still far from over and as Spain continues to lurch from one new problem to the next, many people many asking themselves will this never end?
Isabel is back in Barcelona again, working on a TV documentary she has written and is directing about trade union opposition to the Franco regime in the 1970s, while Edward is busy organising an international conference about the differing ways in which the countries on Europe's peripery are confronting the crisis.
So both of them are, if anything, even busier than before, but then a random event brought them back together again: a film team from the US PBS news programme Making Sense contacted Edward, and asked him to help them prepare some news reportage about what was happening in Spain. So Edward, remembering his earlier conversations with Isabel, picked up his mobile phone, and rang her. She answered, and it turned out that she was back in town again. They met and decided to use the opportunity to start to really go to work on that project they had once talked of doing. They offered themselves as production consultants to Paul Salman and his team, and during three days they accompanied them round Barcelona in a van, meeting people, interviewing, shooting locations, and generally trying to give people in the United States an idea of what life in Barcelona has become today.
And naturally, they took them back to the park where the whole idea was born.
As is evident, the crisis changed their lives, and now they hope that watching the documentary that results from this process will help change yours, or at least your perception of what it is that is so different about this crisis we all find ourselves living through, taking the Spanish case as one example.
SYNOPSIS / OUTLINE:
When the crisis first hit Spain, people had the impression it was just another link in chain of the domino-effect which was set off by the US sub prime crisis. Few were aware in that fateful summer of 2007 of the significance of the fact that Spain's banks , along with those of Kazakhstan, now found themselves almost entirely excluded from Europe's wholesale money markets.
Even if they had been aware of this, they would have had no idea of the potential significance of that fact, nor of why it was that these two countries were classed together in the eyes of the financial markets. They had no idea of what Cedulas Hipotecarias, or indeed any of the other other exotic-sounding financial products Spain's banks had created to meet there funding needs, actually were, or what impact the invention of such "financial products" would have on their lives. Nor were they aware that they might eventually come to rue the day such instruments were invented to be used to finance those very mortgages they themselves needed to help them buy their homes. They had no idea their country was about to become a toxic danger-zone just as the unfortunate inhabitants of Chernobyl were only to learn later about the potential perills that lay in that large building they could see on their daily skyline, which provided work to so many of their friends.
In short, they had no idea just what significance having banks which were "dependent on external funding" really had, nor did they know just what it was about to do to their lives.
Three years later, the consequences for this Southern European country have been little short of devastating. With a level of unemployment which is currently running at around 20% the impact of the crisis has been far worse than that to be found in most other countries in Western and Southern Europe. And while most Spaniards are now resigned to the fact that even as most of their neigbours steadily emerge from recession theirs is still hovering on the brink, they are by-and-large still unaware of the fact that their country now faces many long years of what will at best be economic stagnation, with little prospect of those horrifying unemployment numbers being significantly reduced for half a decade or more.
So just what is it that makes Spain different? Like the United States the country had a large housing bubble, and it accumulated international debts by running a sizeable external trade deficit for far too many years. But difficult as the problems which face the United States are, those in Spain have a different feel about them, so why is this?
Basically, there are many similarities and many differences between Spain, the United States, and the United Kindom. In all three cases, during the good times they were funded by the global financial markets who were tolerant of their large international borrowing needs. Now that the "bad times" are here, these markets are not tolerant at all, and often show great reluctance to lend them money. However there is one very important difference between them, and it is the one we want we want to highlight here - Spain no longer has its own national money, its own currency. It belongs to a currency union, which means that unlike the United States, or the United Kingdom, it cannot print its own banknotes, nor can the Spanish central bank increase the money supply. Spain is thus dependent on the good will of other countries - its partners in the currency union - to finance itself. Indeed, given the rules of the club Spain belongs to, it cannot even set its own fiscal deficit targets.
The problem is not that Europe's monetary union is a bad thing, but simply that, when the common currency was set up, few really saw the kind of problems that might arise, and so their was little done to try to prevent them happening. As Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said, "the Euro is a great experiment", unfortunately it was never made adequately clear to Spain's citizens that they were among the guinea pigs.
So no common treasury was established to help those countries who got into difficulties, a failing which was rectified in May 2010 with the establishment European Stability Fund. Nor was the central bank authorised to intervene in the bond markets to keep the cost of borrowing down for member governments, until that is, the policy was changed under the impact of the Sovereign Debt Crisis.
Most importantly, the economic supervisory role of the EU Commission lacked real teeth, since no one was really willing to give up much of their national soverignty, and while much attention was paid to the size of member state fiscal deficits, none was paid to national trade imbalances between participating countries, until again the crisis hit, and those who had been running large external deficits found they could only continue to fund them by running into the welcoming arms of the ECB.
As a result of this neglect, Spain's economy has now become completely distorted, and rather uncompetitive in relation to its more efficient Euro Area partners. Spain's economy is stuck, and scarcely able to grow. More importantly it cannot export sufficent to pay for its imports, so slowly but surely Spain is running out of money.
Every month either some 5 billion euros (0.5% GDP) has to leave the country (the current account deficit), or someone somewhere has to borrow the money to plug the gap. This financial leakage gives the feeling the money is disappearing from Spain, giving rise to questions like "where is it going?" (under people's beds for example), questions which really don't need new urban legends to answer them, since the answer is fairly straightforward and obvious, even if complex and hard to understand.
One of the key objectives of this film is to try and make the technical explanation for Spain's situation more accessible to an audience who would normally find economic topics "difficult".
So our objective is to try to convey in a clear and straightforward way what is ultimately an extremely complex problem. Hopefully our highly visual, and rather unorthodox, approach will make it easier for people to approach what otherwise seems a rather boring and dreary subject matter.
The filmakers are completely independent, with neither institutional nor party affiliation, and totally non-ideological. What they hope to do identify a problem, putting an end in the process to a long-standing public denial that it even exists, in the hope that drawing attention to Spain's situation will provoke the kind of public debate which is essential if adequate responses are to be found, and if we are to avoid such situations being reproduced in the future, whether in Spain or elsewhere.
In order to make this possible, Edward Hugh, Europe's so called "Doctor Doom", will guide the viewer on a journey that with the background to the crisis, show what has brought us here and where are we now, at the present time, and then finally end up by opening some doors to try to throw some light on what can we do about it all…
Edward will chat/ have informal conversations with Spanish a number of economic analysts, representatives of major banks, real estate developers, and other key players - many of them Edward’s friends, or people he has gotten to know during the course of the crisis - all with the aim of trying to help people understand why money is not circulating here the way it was, why there are so many empty houses in Spain, why unemployment remains stubbornly high and what could be done to put the situation straight…
At the same time, we’ll get to see and feel the crisis through the eyes and day-to-day lives of a few, very well selected characters, people who are in this at the sharp end, and experiencing the direct consequences. People who will talk to us directly and openly about how their lives have changed, about what has happened to their dreams, about what their expectations for the future are, in a way which will enable the viewer to get "close up and personal" with how seemingly abstract, impersonal processes end up impacting on the day to day reality of those who always felt themselves far removed from the world of finance and economic policy.
Take, for instance, Carles (30) and Maria (26), a young couple with two children who have moved-in and "occupied" a flat in an (empty) municipal housing block. Carles and Maria don't belong to any radical "okupa" movement, they simply lost their home after they both lost their jobs, and since Spain lacks any adequate public housing programme for those in need, and since the flats were empty (like nearly a million and a half other private sectors houses) they decided to take the law in their own hands.
Or Javier (45) , an unnemployed Latin american immigrant, whose marriage broke up as the family got into increasing economic difficulty. Javier has been left by his wife, and now finds himself forced to take care of 4 kids and a grandson on his own, and is just left waiting for the eviction notice to arrive, or Marc (31) who is studying French to emigrate to Canada or Pau (28) who has moved to Brasil to be able to work on what he studied, Media and Film degree…
At the same time the crisis is changing Spain, young people have started to talk about debt in another way - as something they don't really want. People are becoming aware they have been living beyond their means, and that their lifestyles will have to change. So people have started to look for their own solutions.
Those who have run out of unemployment benefit have started to wait around outside supermarkets for the daily "throw away" - a more or less rountine sight now in contemporary Spain. Others line up outside churches to receive food, or a free meal.
And since the real difficulty is financing the cash economy, other forms of activity have started to come into existence, such as the "Banc de Temps" (Time Bank) in Barcelona, where those who don't have jobs can still raise their living standards by exchanging what they do have, time, by providing all kinds of services on a time swap and not a cash basis.
Other groups of young people have gone to live live in the countryside, growing their own vegetables and trying to be as much independent they can from the system, trying to depend on money as less as they can… All kind of proposals that come up from people that has taken action and does not want to depend on the system or the politicians…
While others now talk openly about emigrating, frustrated by the seeming impossibility of finding a job, or better put, a job commensurate with their qualifications. Like Jordi Molins, a financial analyst, who moved back to his native Catalonia to go and work in local Barcelona bank, only to find himself unemployed. Jordi announced his disappointment on his blog, declaring he felt himself condemned to a "new exile", and has now left to take up a position in London. How many more "Jordi's" out there. A lot, but no-one is officially keeping count.
Then there are the "new Spanish", the five million or so migrants who came to Spain during the construction boom, but who now find themselves without work, and with little prospect of finding them. Worse, they are far from home, and lack the family support networks that help many native Spaniards survive. Like Diego, a construction worker from the Dominican Republic, who is just about to hit the last of his 420 euro unemployment payments, and will explain how, difficult as the situation in his country is, life in Spain is becoming unbearable.
The journey through the crisis in Spain following such an easy concept to understand for everybody as “running out of money” will end up with the inauguration of the conference where experts from all around the world will put lots of questions: Things can get worse? Can be Spain an example of what other countries shouldn’t do? But maybe at this point a new door is being opened: Will they find a way to get out of here? Is this the begining of a new social era? What will it change?
Some graphics and representative photographs will be used to complete our story and make it direct, understandable and at the same time entertaining.
VISUAL TREATMENT (need to be described)
INTERVIEWEES (need to write a short bio/description of eachone)
Edward Hugh
Macro economist who has lived in Barcelona for 20 years.
Salva García
Economist employed in one of Spain's well known Cajas.
David Rodriguez
Economist concerned with the social dimension of economic changes. Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Mark Stucklin - Property specialist who lives in Barcelona. Spanish Property Doctor for the Sunday Times and author of Spain Property Insight blog.
Miquel Baró - property developer whose business is effectively bankrupt.
Joan Carles Gallego CCOO - Union Leader
Jordi Gual - Chief Economist with La Caixa
Fernando Fernandez - Professor at Spain's IE business school, former chief economist with Banco Santander
Juan Carlos Ureta - President of Renta4 - Spain's largest independent stock trading company.
Manuel Conthe - Es licenciado en Derecho por la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (1976) y técnico comercial y economista del Estado (1979). Dentro de sus actividades profesionales, ha sido director general del Tesoro (1988 a 1995) y secretario de Estado de Economía (1995-1996), entre otras. Entre 1999 y 2002 se desempeñó como Vicepresidente para el Sector Financiero, en el Banco Mundial en Washington y posteriormente como Socio de la consultora AFI.
Fue habitual columnista en diarios como Expansión o El País, analizando desde temas de la vida cotidiana a los más complejos asuntos de la política y la economía española, en que sagazmente mezcla conceptos de ciencias sociales, económicos y teoría de juegos con agudeza intelectual y amplia cultura, hasta su nombramiento como presidente de la Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores de España en 2004;
Alfredo Pastor: Alfredo Pastor is professor in the Economics Department of IESE Business School. His main specialties include the European Union, Spanish economic policy, the role of the state in the market economy and the Chinese economic system.
From 1981 to ‘83 he served as a Country Economist at the World Bank, and from 1983 to ‘85 he held senior posts at the National Institute of Industry, first as director of planning and then as director general.
Following that, he ran the company Enher for five years. Two years later, he became director of the Family Business Institute, a post he left to work as Spain’s Secretary of State for the Economy until 1995.
CHARACTERS
Javier: unnemployed latin american immigrant
Jordi Molins, financial analyst, moving to London. Jordi first announced his decision to emigrate on his blog, when he became disappointed with the response of Spain's financial sector to the economic crisis.
Marc, unemployed graphic designer. Currently studying French to emigrate to Quebec.
Esteve Jané -Young businessman, struggling to maintain momentum in his business
Carles and Maria - a young unemployed couple who have gone to live in an empty block of new social housing units.
INICIATIVES THAT MAKE A DIFFERENCE…
Banc de Temps…
Comunitats autosuficients…
CREW:
Idea and Script: Edward Hugh and Isabel Andrés
Director: Isabel Andrés and Ed?
Cinematographer: Simone or other (still to choose Neus Ollé, Hermes Palalluelo, …?)
2on Camera Operator: Simone Belisario (if there is budget for a second one, but we’ll see if needed)
Editor: Simone Belisario
Musician: If we don’t know yet we don’t put or we put a provisional one…
CVs of Writers and directors: (A description of half page each) and a photo.
PROJECT STATUS: in financial terms if we have something to put, otherwise we don’t put anything.
PRODUCTION COMPANY:
Normally in here there is a CV of the company and their editorial line.
Maybe although we haven’t created it yet, we could invent a name of our company and write a few lines of our editorial criteria… and maybe add a couple of videos I made myself to show we have some experience producing. In any case we’ll need to get somebody to do it, I mean a Production Manager who will organise the shoot, the working plan together with us, and will distribute the money to do the film trying to get better deals from camera rent, restaurants, etc…
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