Directed by award-winning filmmakers Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross (co-directors of THE ROAD TO GUANTANAMO), THE SHOCK DOCTRINE is a feature documentary based on Naomi Klein's bestselling book of the same name. THE SHOCK DOCTRINE is a gripping and incisive deconstruction of how free market policies have come to dominate the world through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries. THE SHOCK DOCTRINE radically challenges the myth that the global free market triumphed on the wings of democracy.
Both the film and the book argue that both big business and governments overexploit natural disasters, economic crises and wars with the very aim of pushing through radical free market policies. Naomi Klein calls this "disaster capitalism." The film traces the doctrine's beginnings in the radical theories of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, and its subsequent implementation over the past 40 years in countries as disparate as Augusto Pinochet's Chile, Boris Yeltsin's Russia, Margaret Thatcher's Great Britain, and most recently through the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.