The Cinematheque

Guests in Attendance

“Besides being one of the better documentaries of 2003, this is the year’s best horror movie.”

David Spaner, The Province

A sensation at the Canadian box-office, this rabble-rousing social documentary traces the history and psychopathology of the most dominant institution of our times. Once it was Church, once it was State, but in this age of globalization, privatization, and free markets run amok, we owe ultimate fealty to the Corporation. If you apply standard diagnostic tests used by mental health professions—as The Corporation does, with hilarious, alarming thoroughness—you discover that the dominant institution of our times shares all the personality traits of a psychopath! Based on Vancouver law professor Joel Balkan’s book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, and co-directed by Vancouverites Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbot, The Corporation assembles a lively, entertaining, and thought-provoking mix of interviews (Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein) and great, often campy archival footage to make its mad-as-hell case.

This 20th anniversary screening of The Corporation is co-presented with Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society. After the screening, Cineworks Executive Director Dan Small will moderate a discussion with co-director and editor Jennifer Abbott, author Joel Bakan, and the film’s educational distributor Katherine Dodds.

“The Corporation​’s radical and troubling diagnosis of what ails the corporation, controversial on its release, has now become a commonplace and accepted idea. A well-recognized high point within the contemporary genre of entertaining yet critical social-justice documentaries, which continues to serve as a flashpoint for community engagement, protest, and action.”

Harry Killas