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Event
Erase and Forget
Dir. Andrea Luka Zimmerman
US/UK 2017
Monday May 28 11:00
1hr 22min
CREA
€5 / Students/Badge Holders Free
Using never before seen archive footage of covert US operations, and interviews filmed over a ten year period, is a new documentary which explores the deep bonds between Hollywoods fictionalized conflicts and Americas hidden wars. It charts the extraordinary life and times of Bo Gritz, one of Americas highest decorated veterans and the 'inspiration' for Rambo and Brando's Colonel Kurtz. Erase and Forget is an inquiry into the nature of human conscience and the limits of deniability, and embodies contemporary American society in all its dizzying complexity and contradictions.
At the time, Gritzs actions seemed laughable, but in the age of the ultimate trumped up reality showman (namely Donald Trump), they seem like an early version of the virus that ate our sanity. Owen Gleiberman, VARIETY
Lt. Col. James Gordon Bo Gritz the American Soldier for the Commander-in-Chief of the Vietnam War is one of the most decorated combatants in US history. He is a man of 'a thousand faces' and the media turned him into the inspiration behind Rambo, Colonel John 'Hannibal' Smith (The A-Team) and Brandos Colonel Kurtz (Apocalypse Now), Gritz was at the heart of American military and foreign policy both overt and covert - from the Bay of Pigs to Afghanistan.
Bo was financed by Clint Eastwood and William Shatner, who supported his deniable missions searching for American POWs in Vietnam. He has exposed US government drug running, turning against the Washington elite as a result. He has run for President, created a homeland community in the Idaho Wilderness and trained Americans in strategies of counter-insurgency against the incursions of their own government.
Bo has also killed at least 400 people, often in the most violent ways.
He embodies contemporary American society in all its dizzying complexity and contradiction. Today, he lives in the Nevada desert where he once secretly trained Afghan Mujahedeen. He is loved and admired by his community. He sleeps with many weapons. He finds it hard to sleep.
Filmed over ten years, Andrea Luka Zimmermans portrait is an artist's perspective of an individual and a country in crisis. She explores the implications on a personal and collective level of identities founded on a profound, even endemic violence. She examines the propagation of that violence through Hollywood and the mass media, the arms trade and ongoing governmental policy.
Deploying confessional and exploratory interviews, news and cultural footage, creative re-enactment and previously unseen archive material (Afghan Mujahadeen and proof of the CIAs drug-dealing out of South East Asia), the film proposes a multi-layered investigation of war as a social structure, a way of being for individuals and countries. In what is becoming an era of permanent conflict.
Moving far beyond political reportage or investigation, necessary as they are, lies a compelling enquiry into the nature of human conscience and the limits of deniability (whether to oneself or others). When redemption is no longer an option, the psyche needs to find other ways to live with itself. ERASE AND FORGET asks what those ways might be. It looks into the heart of darkness; it looks for slivers of light
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LocationCREA (View)
Nieuwe Achtergracht 170
Amsterdam 1018 WV
Netherlands
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