Brit documentary sparks a row

British filmmaker Gabriel Range?s Death of a President threatens to divide the world, writes Saibal Chatterjee.

It has won the critics over and triggered a firestorm. Too inventive to be dismissed and too close to the bones to be just another documentary, acclaimed British documentary filmmaker Gabriel Range’s Death of a President threatens to divide the world.

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Death of a President has stirred a hornet’s nest even as it has bagged the critics’ prize at the just-concluded 31st Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

Kirk Honeycutt of Hollywood Reporter has dubbed the fictional documentary’s brazen blend of fact and fiction “morally dubious”, arguing that it might end up strengthening the very forces that it rails against. But TIFF’s Fipresci jury, headed by veteran German critic Klaus Eder, has lauded the film “for the audacity with which it distorts reality to reveal a larger truth”.

Death of a President revolves around the killing of the President by a lone gunman.

Death of a President

telescopes itself two years into the future to try and imagine what might happen if President Bush were to be assassinated. It revolves around the killing of the President by a lone gunman. Using a news documentary style, Range’s film revolves around an investigation into the assassination. It uses real news footage and blends it with fictional passages to put together a provocative, highly original analysis of the current state of the world.

Throughout the film, we hear the testimonies of all those involved in the horrific act of terrorism, either as witnesses, perpetrators or official custodians of the President. Among these people are protestors outside a Chicago hotel on that fateful day, FBI agents, Secret Service functionaries who failed in their duty, and a slew of suspects and their families.

Death of a President presents a powerful critique of an administration that seems destined to plot its own demise.

The film struck an instant chord at the Toronto festival, earning a standing ovation. At the same time, Range drew a fair amount of flak for his “tasteless” move to use a real-life political figure in a fictional assassination drama.

For Range, this style isn’t new. In 2003, he had made The Day Britain Stopped, in which he attempted to reveal what might happen if Britain’s transportation grid ever came to a complete standstill. But the leap from a inanimate transport system to a living President of the US is huge and would have taken a huge amount of creative gumption.

That is what is remarkable about the film. It goes where no documentary has ever gone before, for better or for worse. The style might be ethically questionable, but Range has insisted that his film is not really about the fictional assassination of President Bush. That act, he says, is only a starting point for a probe into the times we live in. But was it really essential to use a real-life politician to drive home the point?

Range has been quoted as saying that only by using a real political figure could he have articulated the film’s powerful message. A fictional figure would have diluted the impact.

Death of a President addresses a whole range of issues dogging the US today – mounting Xenophobia, the hidden costs of war, the fear psychosis that has led to the undermining of civil liberties, and the effects of a hyperactive media on society and government.

Range and other people associated with the film have reportedly received death threats from undisclosed quarters. But like it or lump it, those that are upset with the way the film has turned out will have to learn to live with it. Death of a President is here to stay. The world cannot ignore its central message.