Naomi Klein is known around these parts for butting together sort of pop-activist bibles, one on branding and the shrinking of public space, "No Logo," and the other on disaster capitalism and free market theory, "The Shock Doctrine." The latter of which was turned into a short documentary, with Klein herself on narration duties, from Alfonso Cuaron, that played the Toronto International Film Festival in 2007, and CBC television afterwards before more or less vanishing into the documentary ether. Now it seems that things have stepped up a notch. Michael Winterbottom has a habit of flipping back from conventional dramas to activist documentary-like films and after his foray into the small intimate emotional cinema slash suspense thriller Genova, he is already underway making The Shock Doctrine into a feature film.

The film is based on a book by Naomi Klein which aims to expose what she calls "disaster capitalism". The theory is that neo-liberal capitalism feeds on natural disasters, war and terror to establish its dominance. Winterbottom´s film will again explore major events in history where the shock doctrine seems to apply, focusing particularly on the dictatorships in Argentina and Chile in the 1970s.

Perhaps the slate of Iraq films prevented Winterbottom and Klein from venturing into the soul-crushing chapter on the rebuilding projects in Iraq since "Mission Accomplished" in 2003, that particular portion does not look the be the focus of (or even broached by) the film. Judging from the timelines that will be covered, this might be a feature which would be an interesting companion piece with Steven Soderbergh's two part opus, Che (aka The Argentine and Guerrilla).