True-crime fans flock to festival of fraud
WE are blessed in this country with many film festivals. As long as you are not too far away from a halfdecent cinema, there will be a week or two of specialist programming a couple of times a year – often fact-based – to make your life a richer place.
Near where I live, apart from the International Film Festival, every year I can see films from a dozen different countries and regions, as well as film festivals devoted to architecture, design, surfing, the environment, cycling, motorcycling and dogs. It’s kind of an embarrassment of riches.
But if you’re lucky enough to be around Ta¯ maki Makaurau/ Auckland on March 29 and 30, you’ll be able to see a decent lineup of films and events devoted to fraud – and the people who
commit them.
The New Zealand International Fraud Film Festival runs at Auckland’s Q Theatre on those two days.
Of the feature documentaries on offer, the most notable might be the Canadian production The Talented Mr Rosenberg, which is a grim and horribly hypnotic portrait of one serial fraudster.
Over decades, the man known as Albert or Allan Rosenberg set up companies, posed as an investor and financial advisor, took out loans and married several times. All of it was fraudulent.
After prison terms, public exposure and many, many articles in the press about his
life, Rosenberg appears to be not just in denial, but still actively trying to rewrite his own history and give his own, twisted, version of the truth.
Unbelievably – literally – Rosenberg agreed to sit down for a lengthy interview for this film.
The Talented Mr Rosenberg is not an easy watch.
It is exhausting and nearly nauseating to watch someone so in love with their own intellect that they think the rest of us can’t see straight through him.
But, in his early career, Rosenberg was horribly successful at persuading some very smart people that he was an ally and friend of theirs.
As someone says early on, the fraudster’s greatest weapon, is our vain belief that we are too smart to fall for a fraudster.
Meanwhile, the one-hour China Hackers is a surprising and illuminating look at the surprising origins of the China’s tech warriors and how they came to be a significant part of the new cold war the world is locked in, mostly being fought between the Nato nations, Russia and China, with allegiances shifting like Orwell’s 1984 and no-one ever completely certain what the other side is up to and who – or what – has been compromised.
The New Zealand International Fraud Film Festival also features a live-panel discussion with the makers and presenters of New Zealand’s own legendary antifraud warriors – TV’s Fair Go.
As well as a free screening of The Lost Leonardo – on the maybe-too-good-to-be-true story of the painting some people believe is the last Leonardo Da Vinci that will ever be found – there’s also Gaming Wall St, on the incredible story of how the internet brought down Wall Street investment houses over a video game shop stock that noone believed would ever be worth buying again.
The Fraud Film Festival promises to be a lot of fun.
If you’re going to be around Ta¯ maki Makaurau on the 29th and 30th, then head to fraudfilmfestival.co.nz and get some tickets now.