This Movie is a Hedgefund

Aim

THIS MOVIE IS A HEDGE FUND is a documentary where we build a cooperative fund to push the just transition & stick it to casino capitalists.

LOGLINE

Artist filmmakers Dan and Hilary set out to run a hedge fund where the upside isn't billions of profits, but a livable planet. 

This crowdfunder is to fund the film itself - not the projects we undertake.

As the camera rolls, the fund becomes real: solar goes up street by street across a London borough, a mass pension divestment campaign takes the fight national, and a strange, beautiful "portfolio" of alternative assets gets drawn up by hand.

Underneath it all sits one question: why is it more profitable to destroy our living planet than to build a sustainable future? 

Chasing the answer takes us from council chambers to FCA meetings to the fossil fuel towns where the far right is rising fastest, and asks whether the economic system, and the political one riding on top of it, can still be taken back.

THE PITCH

This Movie Is A Hedge Fund follows our journey as we build an actual, functioning, cooperatively owned investment vehicle, with real capital and real returns, just measured against a different bottom line. 

It is the direct sequel to our film POWER STATION, which grew out of Ann Pettifor's "Case for the Green New Deal." 

Now, working from her latest book, "The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and Planet," we're turning our method on finance itself.

This movie will go from the hyper local again: Waltham Forest, East London - but this time it will also look at the global financial order. Travelling from the city of London, to Wall Street to Silicon Valley.

Whereas conventional hedge funds chase "alpha", return in excess of the market, extracted however the market allows, our hedgefund aims to deliver a sustainable future. 

This Movie is a Hedge fund chases impact and meaning, entwined, not one dressed up as the other: return measured in solar panels installed, pensions redirected, boroughs unlocked, and a "green and brimming bank" of assets nobody at Blackrock has thought to value. 

While billions flow to prop up a technofascist, extractive status quo, any government that tries to fund the alternative is told "we can't afford it." Dan and Hilary go looking for the people who can explain that contradiction on camera: economists, historians, hedge fund managers where they'll sit down with us. 

What they find is a financial industry increasingly entangled with a political one, the same transnational capital moving through energy, tech, and crypto now visibly bankrolling a resurgent far right. The fund that started as an experiment in redirecting money ends up asking whether money has already redirected democracy.

THE PORTFOLIO

At the centre of the film is a genuinely new creative device: a physical portfolio, an illuminated manuscript, hand-drawn and built by Hilary, that does what an asset manager's portfolio does, except the assets are wind, sun, soil, and the communities that hold them. 

Alongside it sits S.W.A.G., Hilary's own alternative investment category (silver, wine, art, gold), built through urban mining and circular economy practices rather than extraction. 

Where a real hedge fund reduces the living world to a spreadsheet, this one turns the spreadsheet back into something you can leaf through, a treasury of wind and sun and soil, on screen and, eventually, as an object in its own right.

WHAT WE'RE ACTUALLY BUILDING: IMPACT AND MEANING, NOT ALPHA

A real fund needs a real return, so this one has one. It's just not measured the way Wall Street measures it. 

Every investment the fund makes is scored against a plain alternative metric: not "did this beat the market," but "did this put people and planet above profit, and can we prove it." 

Street by street solar in Waltham Forest doesn't beat the FTSE, it beats fuel poverty and a four year planning deadlock. 

The pension divestment campaign doesn't generate a percentage, it generates savers who know, for the first time, where their money sleeps at night, and how to short it out of fossil fuels. 

Impact and meaning, entwined, are the fund's alpha, the two never separated out or traded off against each other. 

The film's job is to make that legible, moving, and investable, so "social return" stops living in an impact report and starts being something an audience can feel.

THE INVESTIGATION: WHY IS DESTRUCTION MORE PROFITABLE?

Running alongside the on the ground storylines is a parallel investigation, built from real interviews with economists, historians, and, where they'll sit down with us, hedge fund managers and financiers. 

The film traces the history of the hedge fund itself and follows capital as it actually moves, across borders, across energy, tech, and crypto, asking the same question in each sector: who profits from the version of the future that burns, and what would it cost them if the future stopped burning?

That question leads directly into the towns where the answer is visible on the street. Grangemouth, where a refinery closure has become a flashpoint for both fossil fuel transition and far right organising. 

Blaenau Ffestiniog, where the decline of old industry leaves a vacuum. 

Clacton on Sea and Jaywick, where fascism's rise and fossil infrastructure's decline sit side by side. 

The film asks, plainly, of people who would know: is it possible to take back control of the economic system, and, if the two are now as entangled as they appear, the political system with it?

THE GROUND WORK: WALTHAM FOREST AS PROOF OF CONCEPT

A change of council administration to Green after four years of deadlock has turned Waltham Forest, where Dan and Hilary live, from a stalled project into a live one, and the film follows all three strands as they move at speed.

A BOROUGH WIDE POWER STATION. Working with Repowering London's proven cooperative ownership model and the local coop Green, established by long term collaborators Organic Lea and HEET, to set up a borough wide community and cooperatively owned power station. Site permissions are being secured now.

UNLOCKING STREET BY STREET FINANCE. Working with POP Energy on a cooperative loan vehicle that could unlock solar for the 130 streets in the borough who already want to act but are blocked by finance rather than will.

A THOUSAND COUNCIL HOUSES. Inspired by Energise Barnsley, a push to get the council to put solar on over a thousand council homes borough wide.

Screenings of POWER STATION continue to galvanise this work on the ground, building toward a screening in the council chambers itself, aimed squarely at the councillors and officers who can unlock it. It sits alongside a mass pension divestment campaign run with collaborator Joanna Coull, which takes the fight from one borough to savers nationwide, turning "shorting" from a hedge fund term of art into something anyone can do with fifteen minutes and a phone call.

THE CHARACTERS

Dan and Hilary, in front of and behind the camera, are the audience's way in. Not experts, not fund managers, two people learning the rules of a game rigged against them well enough to break them, and unafraid to ask an economist to explain themselves twice. Around them: Ann Pettifor, whose economics underpins the whole inquiry; Joanna Coull, driving the pensions campaign; the cooperators at Repowering London, Organic Lea, HEET, and POP Energy making the borough work real; and the neighbours, savers, and small investors who are the fund's actual constituency, the people this was always meant to be for.

WHY NOW

Trust in mainstream finance is at a generational low, wealth inequality has become an openly political fault line, and, in the UK and elsewhere, the same capital that profits from fossil fuels and destabilised markets is now visibly bankrolling a resurgent far right. Waltham Forest's new Green council has just unblocked four years of stalled work at exactly the moment this bigger investigation is ready to widen out from one borough to the wiring of the system itself. Nobody has yet made the film that connects those dots while building the alternative in real time, on screen, as it happens.

TONE

Fast, funny, and unapologetically DIY where a real hedge fund is slick. A heist movie where the heist is legal, cooperative, and slightly ridiculous until it works, that periodically pauses to sit across the table from the people running the actual system and ask them hard questions with a straight face. Handheld urgency in council chambers and FCA meetings; wider, calmer frames for the streets being transformed; something closer to illuminated manuscript, painstaking and beautiful, for the portfolio itself. The humour comes from the gap between the scale of the ambition and the size of the operation attempting it. The gravity comes from how real the stakes turn out to be, on the ground and in the towns where democracy itself is what's up for grabs.

THE ASK

This film needs to be made now, while the Waltham Forest work is finally moving after four stalled years and the wider investigation is urgent rather than academic. The money raised to make it plays the same role as everything else in the story: capital, redirected, put to work, chasing impact and meaning, entwined, instead of alpha.

WHERE THIS IS GOING

The aim is a multi million pound fund delivering robust returns for investors, built entirely from cooperative businesses that are already proving the model: successfully deploying solar, genuinely engaging the communities they sit inside, and answering acute real world problems across 2026 Britain, fuel poverty, pension savings tied to fossil fuels, boroughs locked out of the transition by finance rather than will. Real returns and real impact, built together rather than traded off, at a scale that makes the wider argument impossible to dismiss as idealism.

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 26th October 2026 at 8:43pm