UNBANKED Documentary – Bitcoin: Be Your Own Bank

3 shows per day: 2:30PM, 5PM, and 7:30PM

Tickets and information:

https://www.maysles.org/calendar/unbanked-9-14-25

UNBANKED

David Kuhn, Lauren Sieckmann, 2025, 86 min.

Bitcoin has been controversial since its mysterious release by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. Some say Bitcoin is only comprised of a small minority of anarchist computer nerds, or that it supports criminal activity as just another Ponzi scheme. Others herald the arrival of Bitcoin as financial freedom for the masses after years of abuse by a centralized banking cartel. Passionate views surround this ethereal yet hard-to-ignore beacon-or-bust proposition. Is Bitcoin a myth or a pathway to massmonetary self-determination?

UNBANKED dispels the misinformation. We explore the history of currency, traditional monetary systems of control and what decentralization could mean for the lower classes. Is a peer-to-peer money system practical? Sustainable? We’ll follow the money, literally, [from Harlem], Argentina, London, Portugal, Central America, Nigeria and Ghana.

We are living in a day and age where Bitcoin promises what more people claim they want: disintermediation, decentralization, freedom from transactional parasites, restoration of trust in peer-to-peer interaction and commerce, and a possible exit from the financial cartels who hold all the coins. There’s never been a viable alternative. Until now. Is Bitcoin a house of cards waiting to collapse? Or is it exactly what is needed as governments and central bankers siphon fees and funds from savers and debase fiat currency?