Directed by Charles Ferguson. Narrated by Matt Damon.

An in-depth look into the causes and effects and (lack of) solutions to American’s recession and the guys who screwed it up for all of us but mostly for the very poor of the world.

The Wall Street types must have lost a lot of friends after American’s saw this documentary about how the financial services industry concocted new, intricate and downright nasty ways to make money even while their clients were losing theirs. Of course then there was a not-so-small domino effect called the global recession. In any other civilisation the culprits would have been hung by their balls and skinned alive. Right here on good ol’ planet Earth, they are a part of Barack Obama’s administration!

I’m not very financially minded and some of the graphs and bar charts that director Charles Ferguson uses in Inside Job puzzled me a bit but I got a better understanding of the recession and the causes after watching this highly engrossing, scathing and intelligent piece of filmmaking that’s sure to rile a lot of feathers. Especially since it’s also been nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars.

Throughout the documentary, interviews with the perpetrators, with economists, Federal Reserve Board members, foreign ministers and educators are interspersed with commentary by Matt Damon structuring the whole into segments: cause-effect-solution. The interviews are pretty candid, sometimes acerbic and even confrontational. But you can’t miss the fact that these so-called intellectuals are at a loss for words when the tough facts are put forward. Fortunately for them, the nexus between the government and financial institutions is too strong. And they ended up getting away with fat bonuses and till today, none of the culprits have been prosecuted and stricter regulation seems to be a distant dream.

What’s surprising is that the biggest financial institutions in the world, people you and I probably bank with or deal with at some point of time are the devil incarnate. There was the fall of Lehman Brothers but institutions like CitiGroup, Goldman Sachs and AIG were neck deep in it as well.

This is stuff that’ll make you angry, laugh out loud at some of the mindless replies president’s of large corporations give at committee hearings and it’s also fuel for anti-America fundamentalists who have even more reason to believe America is at fault for all the world’s ills. And Mr Barack ‘for change’ Obama hasn’t rectified anything. It’s up to us. Good luck.