Production dates: August 29-September 14, 2024
TRT: 4:59
Hardware: Sony Alpha 7SII
Software: DaVinci Resolve, After Effects, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Photoshop
Formats available: ProRes 422, .mp4, DCP
Subtitles available: English, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, German
Director’s note: David Bowie died on January 10, 2016. Of course, it’s a coincidence, but many of his fans have remarked since that ‘everything went to hell’ soon after…We saw the normalization of bigotry, misogyny, and generally shameful behavior with the rise of a wannabe American Emperor, who like the Hans Christian Andersen character, is proven time and again to be a naked fraud. 2016 was also the year in which Putin seemed to be winning his ‘long game’…the op started by the KGB in the late 1980s/early 1990s to divide Americans and make us distrustful of each other…Social media helped with the explosion of troll farms, disinformation presented as “journalism”, and the manipulation of polling and election reporting. The New York Times’ Adrian Chen uncovered it all a year earlier in a woefully under-read feature called “The Agency”, published on June 2nd, 2015: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html
As we face the now cult-leading, phony Emperor desperately trying to get back into the White House to save himself from local, state, and federal criminal indictments, and the rise of right-wing hate around the planet, I was reminded of David Bowie’s 1997 song “I’m Afraid of Americans”. I decided I wanted to air my concerns about the strange cultish behavior of a minority of Americans, while at the same time assuring myself and the audience that the data shows that there still ARE a majority of ‘good’ Americans…who defend the US Constitution, insist on the rule of law, and who believe in inclusivity, truth in education, religious freedom, human/women’s rights, common sense migration policy, and who want to heal the planet. Thinking that we are all bad or that all is already lost only further helps authoritarians. As Founding Father Thomas Paine astutely said at the dawn of the great American and French experiments in democracy: “Mankind discovers that the strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resisting it.”
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