Prisoners of Debt: Inside the Global Banking Crisis
1983 · 57m · Canada
Directed by Peter Raymont, Robert Collison
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, tense
During the 1982 global debt crisis, Bank of Montreal chairman William Mulholland confronts troubled borrowers including Dome Petroleum and Mexico, while bankers and experts dissect a fragile international system.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1983 doc about global finance sounds like the most self-serious institutional snooze imaginable—and yet Raymont and Collison somehow make the architecture of collapse genuinely unsettling, treating banker anxiety like psychological horror. The contrarian move here is that the *system itself* becomes the antagonist, not some villain you can point at.
This is essential documentary lineage work: Raymont situating real-time crisis within the formal apparatus of banking testimony and expert analysis, the editing creating a kind of bureaucratic vertigo that feels as crafted as any narrative film. It's the kind of archive piece that reshapes how we understand both the era and what documentary can do with institutional portraiture.
The decision to let Mulholland's face do most of the talking—barely cutting away as he processes the weight of these decisions—transforms what could be talking-heads tedium into something almost unbearably intimate; one committed performance and the whole edifice of financial abstraction becomes human dread.