How We Pulled Off a Bank Job
We bought up £1.2 million of debt owed by people in our neighbourhood. Then we blew it up.
This is how two broke filmmakers pulled that off — and what it taught us about funding impossible ideas.
I was around 40, lost, and pretty certain I’d made a catastrophic mistake.
Channel 4 had commissioned our first feature doc. The one that was supposed to change everything. How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire — the story of me trying to revive my great-grandfather’s Ukrainian distillery, import the vodka, build a business, and somewhere in the middle of all that, make a film about it.
Channel 4 told us that if we put the film into cinemas they wouldn’t show it - they were shutting the strand down.
And then the Russian mafia took over the distillery.
And somewhere in that wreckage I realised I didn’t actually know if I was a filmmaker or an alcohol salesman — and that I’d been naive enough to think those two things could be the same.
Hilary and I had just had our first child. I had no idea what I was doing with my life.
I did what I always do in a crisis. I read. Tolstoy on art and meaning. Orwell on why he wrote. Frankl on finding purpose in suffering. Berger’s Ways of Seeing. These books didn’t solve anything immediately but they did something more important — they reminded me that temporary defeat is just another form of learning, if you’re paying attention.
Then I heard about a group in New York called Strike Debt.
They’d found a hack. An obscure quirk of the financial system where debts — student loans, medical bills — get bundled up and sold on secondary markets for pennies on the dollar. Strike Debt were buying those bundles. And then instead of collecting, they were cancelling the debt entirely. Abolishing it. Millions of dollars worth, gone.
I persuaded my friend Charlie Phillips — then head of documentaries at the Guardian — to send me to New York to meet them. I sat across from Professor Andrew Ross, one of the founders, and felt something shift. His book Creditocracy laid it out plainly: post-war western democracy had been a slow struggle between the state and the creditors, and the creditors were winning. They’d wrapped debt around everything — education, healthcare, housing. The system wasn’t broken. It was working exactly as designed.
I came back to Walthamstow with one question burning: was Britain a creditocracy too? Could you buy up debt here? And — the question that kept me up at night — how do you make a film about this that isn’t boring talking heads? How do you make it dramatic, urgent, impossible to switch off?
We went around our neighbourhood and started asking people. A food bank manager. A teacher. Two guys running a youth club trying to cut knife crime. A homeless kitchen. We shared our research. They all said the same thing — people were desperate, trapped, and had stopped believing anything could change.
So we asked: what if we could actually do something?
We set up a community bank. We crowdfunded the money. We bought up £1.2 million of high interest debt owed by people in our area.
And then, in front of Canary Wharf, HSBC and the Barclays Building in the City of London, surrounded by our neighbours and our community, we blew it up.
That film — Bank Job — premiered at Hot Docs in Toronto. Got backed by the BFI. Screened across the UK. And it taught us everything we now know about what we call Method Art: dreaming up something impossible, funding it through the community it belongs to, and then actually living it in front of the camera.
The film isn’t a document of something that happened. It is the thing that happened.
That’s the method. And it turns out it works for more than just films.
Want to watch the full film? https://membership.power.film/bankjob
And if you’ve got a wild idea that needs funding — you can get my book here: https://shop.minimoviestomillions.com/crowd