EXCLUSIVE: The documentary You Need This, set to make its world premiere next month at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, maintains we’re paying a very high price for consumerism and hyper-capitalism.
Adam McKay is producing the film for Yellow Dot Studios, with Isidoor Roebers and Lea Fels producing for Scenery, (a joint venture with Banijay Benelux), and Tyler Owen and Cecilia Butler producing for Hôtel Motion Pictures. Ryan Andrej Lough directed the film, which will bow in the festival’s Special Premieres section. We have your first look at the documentary in the trailer above.
“Consumer-based capitalism, a 20th century invention, has grown and evolved to become the world’s dominant religion. It is an abstract set of beliefs and ideals that quietly but firmly shape global cultural values and identities,” notes a release about You Need This.
“Fueled by intricately crafted propaganda,” the release continues, “the model of consumerism culturally conditions us to seek meaning from the pursuit of material wealth, the accumulation of products, and the careful curation of parallel and inauthentic online identities.
“It is destroying our shared ecosystem, eroding our human connection, and damaging our mental and physical health. We desperately need to rethink this idea of consuming as a way life.”
Adam McKay attends the 94th Annual Academy Awards on March 27, 2022
Emma McIntyre/Getty Images
McKay said in a statement, “This film makes clear it isn’t religious or political divisions that have turned our world upside down. It is the never satisfied, never ending hunger for corporate profit that is the driving force behind consumerism. And right when the movie starts to feel awfully bleak in the way it chronicles the destruction through global consumption, it shows something remarkable; people are starting to wake up to this reality.”
Lough’s previous credits include directing an episode of the 2022 documentary series Human Playground (narrated by Idris Elba), producing the 2015 drama Entertainment starring John C. Reilly and Michael Cera, and producing the 2015 refugee-themed drama Mediterranea.
“I felt compelled to make this film after many years researching the topics covered within,” Lough said in a statement. “I was displeased with the notion that most people have been reduced to cogs within a work-and-spend consumption machine, which creates more waste, division, and destruction than any other force in human history. Consumer Capitalism – a 20th century American invention – is the worst thing to ever happen to our planet, and it is the world’s dominant socio-economic structure, and the single-most powerful influence on human behavior. The propaganda to power this machine is so effective, we have no idea what it is that we’re doing, or why we’re doing. Most people in the Western world don’t know what Consumer Capitalism truly is, yet we contribute to it 24 hours per day, from birth until death, without realizing it.
“When you zoom out and see what life has become in the Western World, and the destruction our seemingly innocuous actions cause throughout the rest of the world, it shifts your perspective in a way where you can no longer accept what has become the status quo.”
Lough continued, “The world needs this film, and others like it. We, as a society, need to become aware of the power structures that manipulate us from birth to death, creating global division and destruction, using the whole of global society as tools, simply to make more money for a few individuals who care nothing for the planet and the health and wellbeing of any society.”
You Need This is narrated by Serra Naiman and written by Ryan Andrej Lough and Serra Naiman. Executive producers include Staci Roberts-Steele (Yellow Dot Studios) and Heather Mitchell and Benjamin Rednour (Hôtel Motion Picturess).
You Need This is an acquisition title at CPH:DOX. Sales are being handled by ZDF Studios’ Off the Fence.
Watch the trailer above.