American Casino is playing Wednesday, April 29 at 1:00 pm at the AMC Village VII 2 (66 Third Avenue) and Saturday, May 2 at 2:00 pm at the Director’s Guild Theater (110 W 57th St #6).

I saw a fantastic movie last night at the Tribeca Film Festival. American Casino, a new documentary by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, is about the mortgage crisis in the US and the effect that it has had on African-Americans living in Baltimore. They begin by interviewing a number of bankers and disenchanted former employees from mortgage companies and rating agencies as well as the tenacious Bloomberg reporter Mark Pittman and former Commodity Futures Trading Commission official Michael Greenberger. They explained how sub prime mortgages were repackaged and spread across the financial system, creating more risk and putting the US financial system in jeopardy.

The Cockburns then took us to Baltimore, where they interviewed a high school teacher, a Minister and a therapist who were all in danger of losing their homes. The Cockburns argue that the mortgage companies were essentially engaged in predatory lending and that they deliberately targeted the African-American community. Mortgage counselors trying to help these families keep their homes explained that the loan documents were incredibly complicated and confusing and that the companies lied on many of the forms. Families who thought their mortgages would cost $800 a month suddenly found that they cost $2000 a month and that closing costs and escrow fees were added to their monthly payments. The results were devastating. Entire neighborhoods of middle-class families have been hollowed out and some of the Baltimore residents interviewed in the film (all of whom had jobs) wound up homeless. Towards the end of the movie, the Minister explains that she now often sleeps in a friend’s car.

We saw rows of abandoned houses which the city of Baltimore had to board up. As each home is foreclosed on, the value of the neighboring houses goes down too, triggering more foreclosures and devastation. The city of Baltimore is now suing the financial institutions that created this disaster. Footage of hearings with Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney and Alan Greenspan’s testimony are included. The result is a powerful explanation of what went wrong and how the Government bailed out the banks and financial institutions while abandoning the newly-homeless .

I’ve spent much of this past weekend editing my husband’s new book on the financial crisis (Freefall, which WW Norton will publish in January 2010) and I’ve been thinking about how to explain these complicated economic topics in a way that the general reader can understand. American Casino did a superb job of telling this sordid, sad story, and by bringing in the lives of the victims of the crisis, the Cockburns produced a movie which is essential viewing.

We spoke afterwards with Congresswoman Maloney and her husband, and I told her about the work my students did a few years ago to expose the predatory lending company Rent-a-Center. Our class work was turned into a news story that was published in Mother Jones. The Congresswoman asked me to send her a copy so she can try to do something. Salman Rushdie and Hamilton Fish III attended the after-party, and so did several of the people in the movie. We talked to the high school teacher and Michael Greenberger and agreed that everyone needs to see this enraging and powerful film.