NFF Now is a year-round programming
initiative by the Nantucket Film Festival and the Nantucket Dreamland
Foundation featuring special screenings and the season’s best independent
films. This program is sponsored by The Inquirer & Mirror.
119
MIN / USA / Color / 2019 / English
OFFICIAL
SELECTION: 2019 Sundance
Film Festival
Academy Award
winner Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest
Guys in the Room, HBO’s Emmy-winning Going
Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief) directs a documentary
investigating the rise and fall of Theranos, the one-time multibillion-dollar
healthcare company founded by Elizabeth Holmes.
In 2004, Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of
Stanford to start a company that was going to revolutionize healthcare. In
2014, Theranos was valued at $9 billion, making Holmes, who was touted as “the
next Steve Jobs,” the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world. Just
two years later, Theranos was cited as a “massive fraud” by the SEC, and its
value was less than zero.
Drawing on extraordinary access to
never-before-seen footage and testimony from key insiders, director Alex Gibney
tells a Silicon Valley tale that was too good to be true. With all the drama of
a real-life heist film, the documentary examines how this could have happened
and who is responsible, while exploring the psychology of deception.