Waking the Sleeping Giant

“Does this thing emerge into a fully-fledged twenty first century progressive movement or populist movement and it feels very much like it could.”

Jacob Smith, a Golden Colorado based film maker, first decided to make a documentary on Bernie Sanders when he saw something was going on around the country around income inequality. “We were seeing minimum wage ballot initiatives pass in Red States, Thomas Piketty’s book did really well on the New York Times list, we were watching local communities fight really large corporations like Chevron, and win, in local races, despite lots of corporate races in those races.”

Smith said there was a ground swell of outrage against the pervasive and growing income inequality that he describes as the Sleeping Giant of the title of his film “clearly a lot of energy and frustration around the sense that the game really is rigged.”
Smith says that we’re seeing that sentiment on both sides of the aisle with Republicans also talking about how the game is rigged against hard working Americans. But Smith says it’s taken the most energetic form on the Democratic side with Bernie Sanders as the face of it “there does seem to be a sleeping giant out there that maybe really is stirring now.”

Smith says that filming will continue through the end of 2016 to be released in 2017. Smith says he’s interested in what happens after the election, “does this thing emerge into a fully-fledged twenty first century progressive movement or populist movement and it feels very much like it could.”