The thrilling scandal that had thousands of Germans fooled
Asubtitled, feature-length documentary about the collapse of a German electronic payments company doesn’t sound much like entertainment. But Wirecard: A Billion Euro Lie (Sky Documentaries) featured such an unusual cast of characters that it had the makings of a thriller.
There was the boxing promoter employed as a company heavy, dispatched to the home of an investor who had noticed that the books didn’t balance. “I slammed him up against the wall,” he recalled matter-of-factly, demonstrating how he’d held a fist in his victim’s face. The investor remembered his fear after being told that two of these meatheads were on their way to his house: “I knew they weren’t bringing me cookies.”
Then there was the obsessive blogger who made himself ill as he spent years compiling evidence against the firm and posting it in online forums, his home plastered in Post-it notes. And the whistleblowing lawyer in Singapore whose redoubtable mother got the story out by making contact with a journalist. That lawyer, Pav Gill, one of the few good guys in this story, feared for his safety after Wirecard bosses realised that he was looking into the company accounts.
Wirecard was allegedly perpetrating fraud on a staggering scale, accused of money laundering and inflating profits. One part of this, the film claimed, involved illegally distributing millions of pounds worth of gambling proceeds in the US via network or British shell companies; one address for such a company turned out to be a house in Consett, Co Durham. Wirecard denies any wrongdoing.
The directors, Benji and Jono Bergmann, told the story through talking heads, which meant that visually it felt a bit lacking. There was no voice-over, only the testimonies of people involved, from company employees to investigators. The majority of staff, a former executive insisted, assumed that they were working for a legitimate enterprise and couldn’t believe what they heard. “It’s a German company. Germans don’t do this sort of thing,” said one. That same belief may explain the unwillingness of authorities to investigate.
The film kept the story simple.
By the end, Wirecard’s CEO was in custody and its COO was on the run. There was a reminder in the postscript that thousands of small investors lost their life savings; it may have read like a Hollywood thriller at times, but the rise and fall of Wirecard had real-world consequences. Anita Singh
What’s in a face? Quite a lot when you are convinced that your mixed-race daughter has similar features to her racist Engerland-braying grandad. “Alan Fletcher, with his twisted lip, on the face of my beautiful child,” says Giles Terera’s Delroy in Death of England: Face to Face, a new National Theatre collaboration with Sky Arts. In his mind’s eye he sees not his newborn but Fletcher’s spittle-flecked mouth snarling at the girl’s mother: “Don’t even think about having a brown kid”.
Face to Face is the latest instalment in Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’s miniaturist state-of-the-nation story cycle Death of England about two working-class friends, Delroy and Michael, which began life at the National last January. Director Dyer has turned the possibly concluding chapter into an 80-minute film starring Terera and Neil Maskell. It doesn’t require you to have seen the preceding monologues, but by way of quick scene setting, Michael, who is white, and Delroy, who is black and the semi-estranged boyfriend of Michael’s sister Carly, are both reckoning with the poisonous legacy of Michael’s late, thuggishly xenophobic dad.
Face to Face is set over one afternoon during the pandemic in Delroy’s London flat. New fatherhood, lockdown, the reverberations of the George Floyd protests plus a racist altercation earlier that day involving both men all feed into the dramatic mix as a visibly strained Delroy and Michael bat back and forth ideas about inheritance, identity, culpability and belonging, with each turning to the audience to corroborate their points of view. It’s tightly shot, using a cinematic wide lens on moodily lit interiors and splicing rapid rewinds and intimate closeups with more obviously theatrical storytelling techniques (each actor voices multiple characters).
Identity politics is too often characterised as the stuff of intractable tension. But Dyer and Williams upturn that convention, combining old fashioned kitchen-sink realism with a thrillingly refreshed vernacular to point a tentatively hopeful way forwards. Claire Allfree
Wirecard ★★★★
Death of England ★★★★