- When I travel around the world, I meet people in almost every city who say, "I can't afford to live here, I don't know where to go, we may have to move ten miles away." People are so stressed about this and I want to know what is happening, says documentary creator Fredrik Gertten, to the Culture News.

Having a roof over your head is a human right, according to the UN. At the same time, housing is hardly a matter of course today. Rents are getting higher and average wages are lagging behind.

Shock-high housing prices

Documentary creator Fredrik Gertten has an eye for injustice. In the documentary film Push, he explores the global real estate market, charting a disturbing pattern, according to him.

In the Toronto region, rents have gone up by 425 percent in 30 years. In cities such as Barcelona, ​​Berlin, Seoul and Valparaíso, mutual funds buy up cheap real estate, often in poor areas. The properties are then renovated with shock-raised rents as a sanction, says Fredrik Gertten.

- This is a global pattern where those who have the most money want to place them safely and then it is in real estate. Having people who live in them is just messy. The movie is called Push because people are pushed away. People tell me they don't want to be pushed away.

Critical to how Sweden acts

In Push, Leilani Farha, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Housing, becomes the viewer's cicerone in the global real estate market. She travels to London and discovers that many of the luxury apartments owned by anonymous businessmen are empty. She meets people who live with a constant worry when as much as 90 percent of their salary goes to pay the rent. She travels to Sweden and warns that things are going in the wrong direction.

Fredrik Gertten shares Leilani Farha's fears.

During a walk along Drottninggatan in Stockholm, Fredrik Gertten expresses his concern that Swedish politicians have not taken the issue of the multinational capital funds' entry into the rental market seriously enough. It is a big difference from how the issue has been addressed in neighboring Denmark, where the phenomenon became part of the electoral movement.

"Bad rating for Sweden"

- The new government in Denmark has a point in the government program that deals with how to access the capital funds' progress in the housing market. In Sweden, it has been extremely quiet. In many countries, this is the absolute biggest issue. I think it's about Swedish politicians and journalists sitting pretty confident themselves. That's a bad rating for Sweden, says Fredrik Gertten.