The Great American Lie

‘The Great American Lie’ aims to expose social and economic immobility, viewed through the lens of our gendered values.

2019 | Running Time: 87 minutes | Rating: NR

Currently, the United States is experiencing one of its greatest periods of social and economic inequality. Collectively, the wealth of the top 0.1 percent is equivalent to that of the bottom 90 percent. Even though the United States is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, one in five children and one in eight women live in poverty. Growing economic inequality has created cavernous social, economic and political divides. THE GREAT AMERICAN LIE exposes how the current system is failing, in part, because of a reverence for things considered masculine and a dismissal of things deemed as feminine. 

The “American Dream”–a concept that grows ever more politically charged–is examined and critiqued in Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s (Miss Representation, Festival 2011; The Mask You Live In, 2015) gripping third film. Newsom weaves interviews with famous cultural critics, professors, and local thought leaders–Nicholas Kristof, Linda Darling Hammond, and Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, among others – with on-the-ground activists, including Oakland-based principal Ruby De Tie, who are working every day to help those less fortunate and revealing the many ways in which Americans have been failed by the myth of social mobility. Director: Jennifer Siebel Newsom 

Bozeman International Film Festival Spirit Award Winner, 2020

The stories in The Great American Lie were so powerful and moving…this is such an important message you are sharing and so thoughtfully and intelligently executed… I hope that the film reaches a very wide audience.”

KRISTEN CONNELLY VADAS–TV/FILM PRODUCER/WRITER

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