Margaret Atwood regaled Houston audiences in January with her spirited reading at the Inprint Brown Reading Series. Her visionary work Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth is the basis for this poetic documentary on debt in its various forms: Societal, personal, environmental, spiritual, criminal and economic.

Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal (Manufactured Landscapes) interweaves these debtor/creditor relationships with two families in a years-long Albanian blood feud; the BP oil spill vs. the environment; mistreated Florida tomato farm workers and their bosses; and imprisoned media mogul Conrad Black and the U.S. justice system.