You Need This

World premiere: CPH:DOX 2025 / Special Premieres

Consumer-based capitalism, a 20th century invention, has grown and evolved to become the world’s dominant religion. It is an abstract set of beliefs and ideals that quietly but firmly shape global cultural values and identities.

Fueled by intricately crafted propaganda, the model of consumerism culturally conditions us to seek meaning from the pursuit of material wealth, the accumulation of products, and the careful curation of parallel and inauthentic online identities.

It is destroying our shared ecosystem, eroding our human connection, and damaging our mental and physical health. We desperately need to rethink this idea of consuming as a way life.

Through illuminating and thought-provoking conversations with experts in the field of dream research, economics, social psychology, literature and the arts, including novelist Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, lauded economist Juliet Schor, dream scientist Adam Haar-Horowitz and longtime counter-culture performance artist Reverand Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping, You Need This allows us to see our collective behavior from new perspectives, and nudges us to radically rethink our participation in systems that we have seemingly lost all control of.
 
A FILM BY Ryan Andrej Lough | USA, 2025, 82’ | Sales: Off the Fence