SOLD A DREAM

Sold a Dream is a 25 minute investigative documentary created as a final year university project, accompanied by a physical exhibition and custom built fruit machine installation. The project explores how systems of power maintain control over working class people through fast fashion, social media and gambling, looking at the ways aspiration, consumption and addiction are sold as forms of escape.

The film combines interviews, documentary footage and observational storytelling to explore these themes through different perspectives. Contributors include Alexei Hamblin, sustainable practitioner Joshua Samuels, a pub gambler and a young woman in over £2,000 of fast fashion debt. Together, the interviews build a wider picture of how these industries profit from insecurity, attention and financial instability, particularly among young and working class people.

Alongside the film, the exhibition featured a fully functioning fruit machine that played Instagram reels, designed as an extension of the documentary’s commentary. While the film critiques addictive systems and manufactured desire, the machine intentionally drew attention away from the screen, with visitors choosing to interact with the game instead. This tension became part of the work itself, reinforcing the project’s ideas around distraction, reward and participation within the systems being criticised.