(L-R) Editor Enda O’Dowd and director Sinead O’Shea attend the Q&A for All About the Money by Sinéad O’Shea, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. © 2026 Sundance Institute | photo by Sam Emenogu

By Erik Adams

Sinéad O’Shea knows the main participant of her new documentary is a polarizing figure. James Cox “Fergie” Chambers was born the heir to a telecommunications empire, but in 2023, he cashed out his stake in the family business for an estimated $250 million. The self-proclaimed communist then used some of that money to establish a Marxist-Leninist commune in the woods outside Alford, Massachusetts; though generally tolerated by the locals, the commune shot to notoriety when some of its members demonstrated their objection to the Gaza war by briefly occupying the New Hampshire offices of an Israeli military contractor. 

Chambers fled the United States following the action, but continued to draw the attention of journalists like O’Shea, with Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Mother Jones reporting at length on his exploits. Also: The dude cannot stop posting about how much he loves Hamas.

“It’s okay to feel lots of different emotions while watching this film,” O’Shea says prior to All About the Money’s premiere in the 2026 Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Documentary Competition. The audience at The Library Centre Theatre takes that permission and runs with it, laughing and gasping at the twists and turns of Chambers’ life. The post-screening Q&A starts off on a heated note over the way All About the Money portrays the terrorist attacks that precipitated the Gaza war, but once the temperature lowers, O’Shea elaborates on her desire to profile Chambers.

“I just liked all the contradictions,” she says. “He says something one minute which, personally, I find insane and quite objectionable. And then, a moment or two later, he’ll say something which not only makes sense, but evokes some empathy in me. I think it’s interesting that, in a world where we’re being forced to constantly choose between black or white, things are more nuanced. And I just feel we benefit from dealing with things in more [nuanced ways].”

The scope of All About the Money goes beyond Chambers’ flakiness and globetrotting. O’Shea and her team spent extensive time with the people living and working at the Alford commune, like farming couple Jade and Reggie and activist Paige, who served a 30-day prison sentence for her role in the Elbit incident. O’Shea’s goal in Alford, as it was elsewhere in the documentary, was to step back and watch what was happening.

“This was more of an observational film,” she says. “Earlier films that I’ve made have been more authored, but I felt for this it was quite important to be observational. And, you know, acknowledge my presence, obviously — the camera is quite disruptive — but then to try to let the action unfold, then try to have it be a documentary as much as possible, so that the people were free to make their own interpretations. And I think these days it is very political, actually, to present things factually.”

The desire to simply take in the worlds of the commune and its benefactor are felt in the filmmaking. O’Shea and editor Enda O’Dowd often spend quieter, scene-building moments zeroing on a symbolically rotten pear in Paige’s bedroom, or the signifiers of old money surrounding Chambers in an Irish hotel room. There’s an easygoing quality to these inserts that suits the rustic, utopian vibe of the commune — a counterpoint to the whirlwind of Chambers’ life, represented onscreen in frantically typed Instagram Stories and text messages sent to O’Shea. 

One place where that heightened energy was felt in the production of All About the Money was Tunisia, where O’Shea and O’Dowd traveled to catch up with Chambers as he explored his new faith and ingratiated himself, personally and financially, with a local soccer club. Three whole days of footage were confiscated by Tunisian authorities, and the duo had to develop new techniques of shooting covertly: Nothing in public, no visible cameras, no tripods. “It was not quite secretive, but almost,” O’Dowd says. “Of course, Fergie’s the most ostentatious person in the world,” O’Shea adds.

It’s clear that All About the Money was not an easy documentary to make. In her introduction, O’Shea says she and the team were still working on it a week before the premiere; during the Q&A, she says,  “I think it’s going to take years to process this film. It’s such a responsibility dealing with people who are living at such a fine edge.”
When the documentary ends, onscreen text states that Chambers offered to cover the complete costs of All About the Money’s production — if O’Shea agreed to never screen it. The audience laughs, then cheers at the next line: O’Shea turned him down, and Chambers understood.