Imagine this: President George W. Bush gets assassinated and a black man is eventually discovered to be the murderer. The scenario wasn’t too far fetched for British filmmaker Gabriel Range, whose team from Film Four in Great Britain made it the plot of their new mockumentary, “Death of a President.”
The suspect was written to be African American in order to make a point about America’s tendency to “rush to judgment” and how Arabs have been treated in the U.S. since the World Trade Center disaster, according to Range.
In the film, George W. Bush is murdered after making a speech in Chicago on Oct. 19, 2007. Dick Cheney becomes president and seven months later, a Syrian-American is tried and convicted for the assassination.
Meanwhile a black soldier has recently returned from Iraq. Eventually, he was suspected of the assassination but later dismissed. His brother died in the war and their distraught father committed suicide because of it. In examining his father’s personal effects, the soldier realizes that his grieving dad was Bush’s real killer. He held the president responsible for his son’s death.
“Death of a President” debuted Sunday night to such hype at the Toronto Film Festival last weekend that “publicists at the Paramount theater had to make a human chain to block out gate crashers,” noted Fox411.com’s Roger Friedman.
Range managed to sell U.S. distribution rights to Newmarket Films, which handled Mel Gibson’s equally provocative movie "The Passion of the Christ." Newmarket, which reportedly paid $1 million for the film, is expected to give "President" a wide release within the next few months.
Reprinted with permission:
www.eurweb.com
