Fraud is a 2016 conceptualdocumentary film directed by Dean Fleischer Camp. The film is made up of re-edited homevideos uploaded to YouTube. It tells the fictional story of an average white American family of four obsessively shopping at Big Box stores until their increasing mountain of debt leads them to go to extremes in order to wipe the slate clean and keep the money flowing.[1][2]
In the late 2000s, around the time he was directing the short film Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Camp was digging through clips on the user-generated content platform YouTube when he stumbled across over 100 hours of home video footage documenting the life of an unknown American family and uploaded to the Internet between 2008 and 2015. He was initially hesitant to turn it into a documentary because of the effort and time required to cut the footage down to feature length.[3][4][5]
Release
The film had its world premiere at Hot Docs in May 2016 where the premiere was controversial, with arguments breaking out during post-screening Q&As between the director and members of the audience as well as amongst the audience members themselves.[6] The film has been selected to screen at BAMcinemaFest[7] at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York and the Sheffield International Documentary Festival (SIDF)[8] in the United Kingdom.[9][10]
