Cinema Arts Festival Houston 2009

Winner of the Panorama Audience Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, The Yes Men Fix the World is a screwball true story about the satirical activist team the Yes Men. Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno’s theatrical performances take place on unusual stages. Dressed in thrift-store suits, posing as top executives of corporations they consider criminal, the Yes Men lie their way into business conferences and parody their corporate targets in outrageous, yet strangely plausible ways. They do everything they can to wake up their audiences, at the conferences and through the media coverage of their pranks, to the danger of letting greed run our world. Example #1: Andy, playing the role of a Dow Chemical spokesperson, somehow gets on the BBC News and, before 300 million viewers, announces that Dow will finally clean up the site of the largest industrial accident in history, the Bhopal catastrophe. People around the world celebrate, but the market punishes Dow for doing the right thing by slashing its stock value. For a moment, reality was altered, and a large audience was awoken to the possibility of a better world they could create. As they journey from Britain to Bhopal to New Orleans (where they address 1000 New Orleans contractors alongside Mayor Ray Nagin), the layers of lies are peeled back to reveal the planetary self-destructiveness of the market and the possibility of change. Note: This film has one of the very few underwater ballet scenes you will ever see in a political documentary!