The backstory of a film about war: insights from the director

ips publishes a very interesting interview that poses some serious questions...

In his provocative documentary "Why We Fight", director Eugene Jarecki asks whether Washington's foreign policy is overly preoccupied with the idea of military supremacy, and if the military has become too important in U.S. life.

most interesting of all, at least to me, is this...

Q: Have you faced any problems in terms of distribution?

A: If you are a filmmaker trying to cover a politically sensitive subject in the United States, America has suffered such a degradation of our open media system in recent years, such a shift away from the values of a democratic society, that problems arise long before the distribution phase. At the very start, the struggle to get financing for a film like this in the United States would have proved immediately prohibitive. So we moved overseas to the BBC, to Canada, to France and Germany, to countries whose media systems are far more open than ours, and in many ways shame ours.

this is extremely disturbing information although not something that should be surprising to those of us paying attention... what strikes me about this, more than some other things i've read, is that "Why We Fight" is a straight-forward, fact-based, unslanted documentary... are we really so far gone that we can't even face a documentary...?

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