“We Have a Contract with our Audience that We Need to Look Behind the Doors”: Marcus Vetter on His Davos Doc The Forum

When one thinks of the World Economic Forum many words come to mind: Davos, global elite, Bono. One term that decidedly does not is transparency. Which is what makes Marcus Vetter’s The Forum all the more remarkable.

With this fly-on-the-wall doc the German director (The Forecaster) becomes the first filmmaker ever to be granted behind-the-scenes access to the exclusive organization. Vetter follows the WEFs octogenarian founder Klaus Schwab from the run-up decision-making (Who to pair with Netanyahu? Who’s moderating the Bolsonaro? Who gets a souvenir cowbell?) all the way through the glitzy event itself (one attended by both the Amazon-pillaging president of Brazil and the teenage superstar/climate change activist Greta Thunberg, the only guest with the balls to call bullshit on her hosts). In the process he creates a cinematic microcosm that plays like a cross between Andrew Rossi’s The First Monday in May and Jesse Moss’s Netflix series The Family. One in which the rich and powerful, drunk on their own champagne-flavored Kool Aid, groupthink themselves into the pretzel-logic conviction that welcoming the “sinners” — those (almost exclusively white male) titans of industry that Jennifer Morgan, CEO of Greenpeace International attends to confront — in to be “redeemed” is somehow not simultaneously enabling them.

To discuss the process and challenges behind the doc (including placing a boom mic over Bosonaro’s head) Filmmaker caught up with Vetter just prior to the film’s world premiere tonight, October 28, at DOK Leipzig.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.