Bank Job is a mischievous feature documentary led by artist/filmmaker team Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell, instigates and follows a community coming together to make their own currency, opening a bank in order to examine how money and debt is created in our economy and to ask important questions about how the system of money creation might be altered in their favour.

Hilary Powell works with hidden histories and overlooked techniques in acts of imaginative salvage - valuing the seemingly mundane and highlighting and creating the extraordinary in the everyday. Her work is led by materials and places – working in partnership with them with contagious curiosity and experimentation and inviting others into the process – be this collective roller skating in urban precincts (Air/TFL commission) or creating alternative wild operas in industrial hinterlands (Acme Stephen Cripps Award at High House Production Park, ROH Purfleet).

Dan Edelstyn is an experienced film director and producer with multiple commissions for C4. He is also a musician releasing as The Orchestra of Cardboard. ‘Bank Job’ is Optimistic’s second feature film. Their first - ‘How to Re-Establish A Vodka Empire’ also expanded beyond the screen into social action and enterprise as they set up their own vodka brand ‘Zorokovich 1917’ in a bid to enliven the economy of the post perestroika village of Dan’s ancestors. Dan found his dead grandmother’s memoir and decided to retrace her life.

The film was completed in November 2011 in time for the BFI London Film Festival and had a UK cinema release in March 2012, receiving 4 star reviews in The Times, The Irish Times and Empire magazine. It had a US theatrical release in 2012. The film premiered at the BFI London Film Festival, had a theatrical release and 4 star reviews in Times, Irish Times and Empire.