POOR US: Do we know what poverty is?

If we want to make poverty history, we need to understand the history of poverty. A funny and sinister animated odyssey through time.

You fall asleep and dream, traveling across centuries and continents. You find the answers to curious questions: did hunter-gatherers have poor relations? Who became poor faster than anyone else in history? And can Karl Marx make tea? But you also look at big questions: what’s lifted people out of poverty and how? Is there a formula that would work again? Is poverty an “engine of the system” and a great driver of progress – or a terrible by-product of inequality?

Find out more about measuring poverty and how poverty where you live compares with the rest of the world.

Watch Love & Rubbish, a film about what's it like growing up poor today, and Stealing Africa, a look at resource exploitation in Zambia.

Directed by: Ben Lewis
Produced by: Femke Volting & Bruno Felix
Production company: Steps International & Submarine Pictures