Salem Progressive Film Series presents
The Divide. What Happens When the Rich Get Richer

Tuesday, January 16th at 7 p.m. (doors open at 6:15)
Salem's Historic Grand Theatre (191 High Street NE, Salem, OR)

The Divide creates a lyrical, psychological and tragi-comic picture of how economic division creates social division.

(SALEM, Ore.) - In the United States, the richest 0.1 per cent of people own roughly the same as the bottom 90 per cent; in the UK, the 1000 richest are wealthier than the poorest 40 per cent. On both sides of the Atlantic, inequality is at its highest level since 1928.

Surprisingly, these are about the only statistics in Katharine Round's film The Divide. You would expect more, seeing as it was inspired by the 2009 book The Spirit Level, a graph-heavy manifesto linking wealth and social outcomes by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.

Instead, film maker Round dwells on the human story behind the numbers, and tells it very effectively. The film follows seven people in the UK and the US as it explores what happens to everyone when the rich get richer.

By weaving these stories with news archive from 1979 to the present day, The Divide creates a lyrical, psychological and tragi-comic picture of how economic division creates social division.

Special Guest Speaker: Russ Beaton, Professor Emeritus of Economics from Willamette University

Don't miss it! Tuesday, January 16, 2018 at 7:00 p.m., doors open at 6:15
Salem's Historic Grand Theatre (191 High Street NE, Salem, OR)

Watch the documentary trailer: