Film

Earlier this month, we passed the tenth anniversary of the Bear Stearns collapse and the near total melt-down of the global financial system.  The financial crisis took many forms, from people lining up outside banks desperate to get at their savings, to the dilapidation of newly built suburban homes that were foreclosed on. Inside Job (2010), a punch-packing documentary by San Francisco based Charles Ferguson, the director who previously picked through the wreckage of US Iraq policy in No End In Sight, goes straight to the top.

Nicholas Winton is a kindly old English gentleman who likes nothing better than to potter around his garden. He is a very ordinary fellow and yet, it has only recently emerged, he was responsible for saving hundreds of children from Nazi death camps.

It is 1947. Now that India is no longer a British colony, politician Mohammed Ali Jinnah (Christopher Lee) sets himself a simple task: "To carve out a country. But how and where to start?" The founding father of Pakistan is faced with a King Solomon conundrum, but errs on the side of partition, with a new country that will safeguard the rights of the Muslim minority by breaking free of Hindi-dominated India. An advocate of fair play and religious freedom, Jinnah militates for a separation of faith and state.