When producer Bertrand Faivre (Le Bureau) first mentioned his idea for making a film about tax evasion to some colleagues in the film industry, they responded: “You’re right, we pay way too much tax!”
Director Yannick Kergoat was amused by this response but his documentary, Tax Me If You Can (produced by Le Bureau and Wild Bunch and screening this week in the Hot Docs/EFP Changing Face of Europe programme), isn’t about the movie business.
Its subject is how tax evasion on a truly mind boggling scale has become an essential mechanism of neo-liberal globalisation. To put it crudely, multinational companies have been raking in billions and billions while everyone else has been left to suffer. Money which could have been invested into public services has instead disappeared into tax havens.
Kergoat is a distinguished and experienced editor with credits ranging from Dominik Moll’s Harry, He’s Here To Help(2000) to Mathieu Kassovitz’s Gothika (2003).
“Although I follow political and economic news closely, I was not at all an expert on the issue of tax evasion,” he admits. “[But] I became one after several months of investigation. That is to say a lot of reading (books, articles, reports), but also a lot of meetings with people who devote part of their lives to it (magistrates, economists, political or association leaders, etc.). Part of the project was to give them a voice.”
Kergoat’s skills (and those of the doc’s editor Michaël Phelippeau and co-writer Denis Robert) turned out to be vital to the project. He likens putting the film together to weaving an intensely complex spider’s web.
“The archival research, the animation sequences and all the narration of the film (construction, voice-over) were done during the editing period. This lasted almost a year. The main challenge was to build a linear cinematographic narrative (a beginning, a middle, an end) with events, ideas, facts linked together. The other challenge is to always keep the attention of the spectators, even though the film is very dense in information. For this, you need a story that is rhythmic by often varying the way of telling [the story].” This is effected via interviews, archive, animation, computer graphics, etc.
The documentary touches on everything from the Mossack Fonseca tax evasion scandal to Luxembourg’s corporate tax controversy (and former prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker’s part in it); from the way Google sidesteps tax by shifting cash to Bermuda to the role of President Trump in helping the rich dodge taxes.
Kergoat uses humour and irony alongside forensic data analysis. When concepts are hard to express verbally, he sometimes turns to animation.
“The ambition of the film was clearly ‘educational’: to describe the mechanisms and actors of tax evasion while pointing out political responsibilities. One does not go without the other,” the director suggests. “From the start of the project, we didn’t want it to be “funny”, but for there to be humour….humour makes it possible to create a connection with the public, by moving away as much as possible from an overhanging academic discourse and by integrating what the public already knows on a subject that has already been covered a lot by the media.”
Le Bureau’s Faivre initiated the project, bringing Kergoat together with writer Robert. Wild Bunch’s Vincent Maraval, one of France’s leading indie distributors and producers, also came aboard. (Wild Bunch has recently rebranded as Goodfellas). It was clear that many within French cinema supported the project and felt this was a movie that needed to be made. However, perhaps because the documentary was asking questions with the potential to embarrass them, leading broadcasters all refused point blank to back it. “To complete the budget, we therefore launched a crowdfunding [drive] and 4645 people gave money for the film to exist,” says Kergoat.
Tax Me If You Can was released in France last December. It didn’t provoke the scandal that the filmmakers had hoped. “The tax evaders and politicians implicated in the film have all adopted the best strategy for them: to remain silent and ignore the film so as not to give it publicity,” the director notes of the code of ‘omertà’ which the white collar crooks, financiers and politicians adopt to stifle debate.
The film was screened at the National Assembly in France in February without causing much stir. It will be screened there for a second time next October. “We’ll see if it generates more interest. Anyway, the film will not be out of date for a while,” Kergoat observes of a doc is bound to remain relevant for a very long time. After all, as he discovered while making the film, tax evasion isn’t something which can be straightened out with a few changes to European law. It has become a fundamental part of the neo-liberal way of doing business.
“The dominant political system does nothing to stop it. …the initiatives taken at the OECD [show] by their lack of scope and their ineffectiveness that the economic and political elites have every interest in doing nothing, except from time to time offering pledges to their respective public opinion.”
The public, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to realise quite how badly it is being fleeced. In France, tax evasion is estimated at between 80 and 100 billion euros annually. That is between a third and a quarter of the state budget. France has seen violent riots in recent months because of plans to reform pensions and make ordinary people work for longer into their 60s. Kergoat believes these protests would have been yet more explosive if there had been a wider consciousness of how many billions of euros of cash are still disappearing into tax havens.
And, no, making Tax Me If You Can, hasn’t done much for its director’s own bank account. That is why he will soon be going back to the day job. “I earn my living as an editor. And everyone knows that making documentary films (especially like this one) does not allow you to earn enough to live. So I’m going to go back to editing – with pleasure, because it’s an activity that I really enjoy – to replenish my personal funds.”
