“The Yes Men Fix the World”
2010 Ethics Film Series
February 23, 2010

A true story about two gonzo political activists who, posing as top executives of giant corporations, lie their way into big business conferences and pull off the world’s most outrageous pranks. Post-film discussion led by the Yes Men themselves, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, and Jennifer Jenkins, director of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School.

Synopsis:
(Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno, & Kurt Engfehr, 2009, 87 min, USA, in English, Color, 35mm)
Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are two guys who just can’t take “no” for an answer. They have an unusual hobby: posing as top executives of corporations they hate. Armed with nothing but thrift-store suits, the Yes Men lie their way into business conferences and parody their corporate targets in ever more extreme ways – basically doing everything that they can to wake up their audiences to the danger of letting greed run our world.

One day Andy, purporting to be a Dow Chemical spokesperson, gets on the biggest TV news program in the world and announces that Dow will finally clean up the site of the largest industrial accident in history, the Bhopal catastrophe. The result: as people worldwide celebrate, Dow’s stock value loses two billion dollars. People want Dow to do the right thing, but the market decides that it can’t. On their journey, the Yes Men act as gonzo journalists, delving deep into the question of why we have given the market more power than any other institution to determine our direction as a society.

Post-film discussion led by Yes Men Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno and Jennifer Jenkins, director of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School.

See the trailer: http://theyesmenfixtheworld.com/

Watch an exclusive interview with the Yes Men brought to you by the Kenan Institute for Ethics:

The 2010 Ethics Film Series was cosponsored by the Arts of the Moving Image Program and the Center for Documentary Studies.