The Divide : what happens when the rich get richer? a film by Katharine Round ; Media Education Foundation

Credits : Edited by John Mister ; director of photography, Woody James ; original music by Andrew Hewitt

In the US, the richest 0.1 per cent of people own roughly the same as the bottom 90 per cent; in the UK, the 1000 richest are wealthier than the poorest 40 per cent. On both sides of the Atlantic, inequality is at its highest level since 1928.

Surprisingly, these are about the only statistics in Katharine Round’s film The Divide. You would expect more, seeing as it was inspired by the 2009 book The Spirit Level, a graph-heavy manifesto linking wealth and social outcomes by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.

Instead, Round dwells on the human story behind the numbers, and tells it very effectively. The film follows seven people in the UK and the US as it explores what happens to everyone when the rich get richer.

We meet a Wall Street psychologist desperate to be part of ‟the 1 per cent” (at least of psychologists), and who aspires to own a second home in Florida. Then there’s a homeless Glaswegian rapper who just aspires to stay sober, a KFC worker in Virginia worried about the ‟pure rage” felt by some towards those with more, and a Walmart employee who is struggling to keep her home. She has no problem with businesses making a profit, so long as they don’t do it at the expense of their staff (which, in her case, they do).

The fifth story is of a carer in Newcastle who feels under appreciated by employers and community alike. But at least she’s free. Number six is in jail for 25 years after he was caught with 1.5 grams of ‟dope”, a victim of California’s three-strikes law. At the other end of the spectrum, though she doesn’t seem to realise it, a new resident of an upscale gated community in Sacramento worries that her neighbours won’t talk to her because they consider her ‟too poor”.