Keith Fisher, a banking lawyer in Ballard Spahr's Washington, D.C., office, plays a banking lawyer defending Wall Street banks in the documentary Cleveland Versus Wall Street. The independent film, screened at the Cannes Film Festival last year and due to open in the U.S.
April 8, dramatizes a lawsuit the city of Cleveland filed against 21 banks that financed, and foreclosed on, some of the bad loans that left Cleveland residents without homes.
The suit didn't make it through trial, but the film, by Swiss director Jean-Stephane Bron, imagines what might have happened if it had. "It was fun," said Mr. Fisher, who defended the banks in the film. "But it was an enormous amount of work. These actors put in 14 and 16 hours a day. We were paid nominally, cost of meals. It was a low-budget production."