Ondi Timoner’s film, The New Americans: Gaming a revolution has been acquired by Republic Pictures for worldwide distribution by Paramount Global Content Distribution. The award-winning documentarian, Timoner, most recently directed the critically acclaimed documentary, Last Flight Home.
The New Americans: Gaming a revolution is a visceral, meme-driven journey into the intersection of finance, media, and extremism which explores the possible connection between the Gamestop short squeeze and the insurrection in American nation’s capital to look at the explosive and irreversible ramifications of their digital future. Timoner takes audience inside the ‘revolution’ game itself through the eyes and language of cryptographers and fanatics, hedge funders, bored housewives turned day trading ‘apes’, college-kid millionaires, white collar criminals, and financial TikTok influencers, to reveal how they got here and where they’re headed, as they stand on the precipice of a new era. Her newest film has been lauded by critics as a timely update to her prophetic 2009 Sundance Grand Jury Prize-Winning film We Live in Publi, which predicted the loss of privacy and intimacy in our online future.
The film features Jordan Belfort (The Real Wolf of Wall Street), Anthony Scaramucci (Former White House Communications Director and Founder of Skybridge Capital), Raoul Pal (Founder of Real Vision), Jaime Rogozinski (Founder of WallStreetBets), Alexis Ohanian (Co-Founder of Reddit), Shepard Fairey (Contemporary Artist), Joby Weeks (Indicted Bitcoin Entrepreneur), Joel Perez (Retail Trader), Blayne Macauley (Retail Trader/Housewife), Hugh Henne (Founder of Hennessey Capital Management), Angela Zhang (Founder of LowKey Trading Discord), ProTheDoge (Cryptocurrency Trader), Taylor Price (Financial Influencer), Juki Timoner (High School Student), Andrew Left (Founder of Citron Research) and Neha Narula (Director of the Digital Currency Initiative, MIT Media Lab).
The deal was negotiated by Dan Cohen and Bahman Naraghi.
‘I wanted to look how the Internet gives rise to a populist hive mind, which can bring unprecedented challenges to the very pillars of our democracy – Wall Street and Washington D.C. There is a great mistrust of our system and its leaders since the 2008 financial crash, which runs deeply through the American bloodstream and has us looking for ways to circumvent the current power structures. I wanted to capture the anarchic, often riotous energy that drives this revolution game in a fun and visceral way, using the very memes that threaten to upend our financial markets, to explore the new ways we are organizing online as a society and where we are headed’, said Timoner. ‘Our premiere screenings and panels at SXSW showed us that the film sparks conversations about where we are headed and ignites emotional debate, so I am excited to partner with Republic Pictures and its enormous global reach to find the broadest possible audience’.
The film was produced by Timoner and David Turner. Berlinger, James Packer, Bahman Naraghi and Kasia Neiman are executive producers. Michael Smith Liss and Ignacio Figueras serve as co-executive producers.
