Lauren Greenfield’s The Queen of Versailles was the perfect and perhaps too prescient portrait of a specific slice of the 1%, and now for her next documentary, she takes on a bigger scope. Generation Wealth, based on her recent exhibit, is a look at different factions (and the machinations) of obscene high class. Following a Sundance premiere, Amazon Studios picked it up for a summer release, and now the first trailer has arrived.
Dan Schindel was mixed in his Sundance review, saying “The results are, predictably, both infuriating for the extreme societal inequality these people embody and depressing for all the ways their money has failed to give them any lasting satisfaction. From the former hedge fund manager turned fugitive to the flash-in-the-‘90s-pan rapper to the onetime porn star, we see clear patterns of status and power acting as a drug, driving people to seek more until they hit some kind of crash.”
See the trailer below.
For the past 25 years acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield (The Queen of Versailles, Thin, kids+money, #likeagirl) has travelled the world, documenting with ethnographic precision and an artist’s sensitivity a vast range of cultural movements and moments. Yet, after so much seeking and searching, she realized that much of her work pointed at one uniting phenomenon: wealth culture. With her new film, Generation Wealth, she puts the pieces of her life’s work together for in an incendiary investigation into the pathologies that have created the richest society the world has ever seen. Spanning consumerism, beauty, gender, body commodification, aging and more, Greenfield has created a comprehensive cautionary tale about a culture heading straight for the cliff’s edge. Generation Wealth, simultaneously a deeply personal journey, rigorous historical essay, and raucously entertaining expose, bears witness to the global boom-bust economy, the corrupted American Dream and the human costs of capitalism, narcissism and greed.
Generation Wealth opens on July 20.