All About the Money: A Communist Heir, a Commune and an Extradition Fight

James 'Fergie' Chambers, heir to an estimated $250m fortune, is fighting extradition from Spain. That is the stark position in which Sinéad O'Shea's documentary All About the Money finds its central subject. The Irish film-maker has built her film around a man who inherited vast wealth and chose to spend it on communism.

Chambers, whose full name is James Cox Chambers, belongs to the wealthy Cox family. The Guardian's review describes them as a liberal clan who have backed leftist causes in the past. Fergie, as he is known, wants to go further politically than his relatives ever did. When viewers first meet him, he is the founding member and bankroller of a communist community of fewer than a dozen people in Alford, a town in rural Massachusetts.

The communards commit themselves to learning, to self-sustaining farm work, and to running a jujitsu studio and gym. The gym has one notable rule: it will not accept members of the police.

What went wrong at Alford?

The community's troubles begin with a protest. The group target Elbit Systems, the Israeli-owned arms manufacturer. According to reports cited in the film, the action slides into "criminal mischief and criminal trespassing". Several Alford members are arrested, among them one Paige Belange.

O'Shea's film cuts back and forth between interviews with Belange, other communards and Chambers himself, who by that point has scarpered to Tunisia. He pays for Belange's defence and covers other costs arising from the action. Even so, considerable rancour rises between Fergie, Paige and other former Alford community members.

The review notes that O'Shea perhaps wisely does not let the film get too bogged down in parsing that conflict.

How does the film handle its subject?

All About the Money dispenses a great deal of backstory through intertitles. Yet, as The Guardian's reviewer observes, audiences are left with many questions when the credits roll. Chief among them: how did O'Shea gain access to Chambers at all?

The review frames the documentary as a brave attempt to package a complex character and a complicated story. It captures what it calls the confusion and compelling weirdness of a wealthy leftwing heir — a man who bankrolls a tiny communist experiment in the Massachusetts countryside while his family fortune, built on the Cox media dynasty, stands behind him.

What does this change for documentary viewers? Mainly this: access. O'Shea secured interviews with a fugitive heir, his estranged former communards and the defendant whose defence he funded. That material, unevenly shaped as it may be, documents a rare collision of inherited wealth, radical politics and criminal charges. Chambers' extradition fight continues, and the film stands as an early record of how the Alford experiment unravelled.