Red Emma’s

In the Great Recession, Wall Street crashed the economy but got rewarded with enormous government bailouts, while millions of Americans—evicted, unemployed, desperate—had nowhere to go for help. When a small group of people responded by setting up camp in a New York City park, their protest ignited one of the great democratic movements in U.S. history.

A personal narrative with footage from travels to 42 occupations in 27 states, Occupy Wall Street: An American Dream (dir. Michelle Fawcett, 2025, 51 min.) offers a unique look at how the movement spread like wildfire, upending politics as usual. It’s the story of laid-off factory workers in the Rust Belt, Indigenous activists in the Southwest fighting another kind of occupation, recent graduates saddled with debt and no jobs, and homeless veterans of America’s forever wars kicked to the curb. But out of this suffering, the occupiers forged a new American Dream on street corners, parks, and public plazas from coast to coast. And out of this struggle, they flipped the script from austerity to inequality, from reform to revolution, and from fear to power, heralding a new era in American politics.

The film contextualizes Occupy Wall Street in historical perspective and captures the joy and challenges, humor and love of a movement that Professor Frances Fox Piven, co-author of Poor People’s Movements, called “one of a series of movements that has episodically changed history.”

Michelle Fawcett, PhD, has worked in the media from Hollywood to academia to grassroots organizing. She is the director of Occupy Wall Street: An American Dream, a film based on travels to 42 occupations in 27 states in 2011-2013.

Arun Gupta is an investigative journalist. He was the founder of The Occupied Wall Street Journal and covered the Occupy Wall Street movement across the country for Salon, The Guardian, The Nation, and many other publications.