This is another case of my having a personal stake in a film I'm reviewing, but that can't stop mentioning it. Kevin Wilmott is another graduate of the Kansas City indie film community and one of the good ones.
What if the South had won the Civil War? On that simple keystone Kevin creates a Ken Burns-ish mockumentary that takes the audience through about 120 years of American history as seen by a BBC like film crew.
Is the film perfect? Of course not, few films that land up on this site are, but this one has so many wonderful pluses that it should not be ignored. Will it make you angry? Yes, that is the purpose! It shows, among other things, that racism is still around in this country, and was not wiped out by the Civil War or the Civil Rights movement.
Is it funny? Inescapeably, darkly and insistantly funny. There are commercial breaks between the "documentary" segments that will make just about anybody squirm, even more when you realize the "secret" behind the products promoted. This is the kind of film that indie cinema was meant to produce. Something that would never make a lot of money, but always make us stand up and take notice. When it is over we should all say a bit of thanks to those who made this picture.
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1 comment:
Oh I hate this, another post-puritan hypocritical and ignorant snap against the only half of the country that had the bawz to give the government the same message we had given England eighty-six years before-tyranny may exist but not on our soil. Yet instead of a king, the Confederacy defended itself against a Baboon, that particular primate born two hundred years ago last Thursday.
"The contest is really for empire on the side of the North and for independence on that of the South." -London Times, November 7, 1861
The difference, however, was that the thirteen colonies were breaking English law by pursuing secession. The thirteen Southern states on the other hand were acting within United States constitutional rights when they chose to secede. Just as countless tyrants have revised the Bible in their minds to cause persecution on others (you Plymouth Puritan decedents should be schooled in this) Lincoln’s administration did the same with the US constitution while inaugurating the bloodiest and most destructive invasion in US military history. Against friends and brothers alike.
"The South maintained with the depth of religious conviction that the Union formed under the Constitution was a Union of consent and not of force; the South challenged the North to find one trace of authority in that Constitution for invading a sovereign State."-Lt. General John Gordon
In every single memoir I have read written by Confederate & Union citizens and veterans alike (generations before the Civil Rights movement) the cause of racism or slavery is never listed in the many causes they list. Even the villain Nathan Bedford Forrest had actually been very public about his friendship with black Americans.
"I came here as a friend...let us stand together. Although we differ in color, we should not differ in sentiment."
No Confederate veterans had ever been connected with violence against black citizens and few ever study the truth behind the resentments that existed in the South against US colored troops. They viewed black Union soldiers in the same light as white Southerners wearing the blue uniform as traitors and scalawags. Letters have shown that black Confederate veterans viewed them in the same light! Of these black Confederate veterans, their sacrifice censured, Mary Drummond, wife of Confederate veteran Major Edward Drummond wrote,
"...I hope to live to see a Monument raised to their memory for they deserve it, and we bless them for their faithfulness..."
This movie suckles from the deep seeded hatred and ignorance fanned by politics and media to turn the Southern war of independence into a repulsive myth.
If the Confederacy really had won the war I wonder if we would have made a movie like this on grounds that the North not only fought to preserve the Union but slavery as well. Why not considering the president that led that war against the Confederacy wrote,
"There must be the position of superior and inferior, that I as much as any other white man am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man."
Imagine that, yo.
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