Many people have wondered, in the two years since Lehman Brothers collapsed, what will remain of global capitalism as it existed before the fall. To judge from the recent US financial reform bill, the answer is: almost everything. A more natural question is what will be left of pre-crash anti-capitalism. German television watchers were given a chance to assess its track record when Let's Make Money, a documentary by the Austrian filmmaker Erwin Wagenhofer, aired on national television two weeks ago. This German-language film is pre-crash anti-globalism in its most highly developed form. It appeared in late 2008, almost simultaneously with the acute phase of the world financial crisis. It is a beautiful film, and Mr Wagenhofer was justly awarded last year's German Documentary Film Prize. To credit him with prescience about the global system, though, is to go a bit far.

Let's Make Money purports to follow the savings of an average depositor as they travel through the global economy, and to lay out the terrible injustices they pay for, particularly in poor countries, in order to grow. While Mr Wagenhofer loses this thread, he winds up with an engaging travelogue that ricochets back and forth between the developing world and Europe. There are vivid and moving shots of the poor of the global south: men mining gold with explosives in Ghana; children sleeping on streets in Chennai; and, most alarmingly, men and women picking, packing and weighing cotton in Burkina Faso. The cotton monoculture that global demand imposed on Burkina Faso has turned the place into a desert. Life expectancy is 42 years, and 62 per cent of the population earns less than a dollar a day.

Within a few minutes we have a good idea of Mr Wagenhofer's technique of persuasion (or, if you like, propaganda). Africans and Asians appear in this film only to suffer; the growing middle classes of India are not visible even peripherally. Other Bric countries are ignored. The Europeans (buttressed by a few experts from poor countries) are there to explicate, and are set up as good guys and bad guys. After Mr Wagenhofer's arresting scenes of developing world penury, globalisation's detractors look selfless and prophetic, while its defenders look gullible or predatory.