Showing with closed captions
MAY 4, 6:30 PM // Big Ideas presented by Scotia Wealth Management
Abigail Disney, filmmaker and activist and co-director of The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, joins us, along with her co-director Kathleen Hughes, to talk about America’s profound inequality crisis, and the challenges of using her famous last name to help Disney and other large corporations do right by their lowest-paid employees. Hosted by policy analyst and commentator Brittany Andrew-Amofah. This Big Ideas discussion will also be available to stream online with the film.
About the film
No longer the "Happiest Place on Earth," Disneyland has become a hotbed of inequality with a workforce in crisis. Filmmaker and activist Abigail Disney turns the camera on her own family's legacy theme park to uncover the corporation's treatment of its workers. She exposes her own position of power, while following several Disney employees who face evictions, navigate inadequate health care, struggle to put food on the table and endure extreme precarity in the face of rising costs in Southern California. With no role in the multinational conglomerate, she attempts to pressure the Disney corporation to address its inhumanity and make urgent changes from within. What starts off as a personal journey transforms into an explosive look at the historical maneuvering that built modern American capitalism. The American Dream proves to be a very grim fairy tale for the 99 per cent. Heather Haynes