British film courts controversy by fabricating Bush assassination
Last Updated: Thursday, August 31, 2006 | 1:39 PM ET
CBC Arts
A controversial British film that fabricates the assassination of U.S. President George Bush will screen at the Toronto International Film Festival and air on a BBC channel later this fall.
The film Death of a President, produced by Gabriel Range, Simon Finch and Ed Guiney, combines real news and documentary footage with acted scenes to create the story.
The 90-minute film takes the form of a fictional documentary looking back at the assassination of Bush in October 2007 in Chicago.
In the film, Bush is confronted by a massive demonstration against the Iraq war when he arrives in Chicago and is gunned down by a sniper as he leaves a speech.
The hunt for the killer focuses on a Syrian-born man, Jamal Abu Zikri, giving an opportunity to explore issues of the political climate in the U.S. amid the war on terror.
Actors play fictional secret service agents and aides who recall the shooting in interviews recorded for the retrospective documentary.
TIFF reviewer Noah Cowan calls the film "dangerous and breathtakingly original," and says Range does a masterful job of integrating the real and the fictional, using special effects.
On the TIFF program, which starts Sept. 7, the film is referred to as D.O.A.P.
Peter Dale, head of More4, the BBC digital channel airing the film Oct. 9, called it a "thought-provoking critique" of contemporary U.S. political realities.
"It's an extraordinarily gripping and powerful piece of work, a drama constructed like a documentary that looks back at the assassination of George Bush as the starting point for a very gripping detective story," he said.
Dale acknowledged that the film describes an unwelcome scenario and could be considered provocative.
"I'm sure that there will be people who will be upset by it, but when you watch it you realize what a sophisticated piece of work it is," he said.
Range and Finch have done two similar projects for BBC2, both of them critiques of Britain's body politic that combined real footage with fictional disaster story.
The Day Britain Stopped shows a complete failure of U.K. transit systems after a rail strike and plane crash coincide. The Man Who Broke Britain posits a Britain in financial turmoil after oil prices peak and a shady trader loses millions for a major bank.
