US: Michael Moore's provocative documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11 had its world premiere at the 57th Cannes Film Festival yesterday evening. The film constitutes a two-hour assault on the presidency of George Bush and could damage his re-election prospects on November 2nd . . . if the film finds the substantial US audience Moore expects it to attract.
The film already had been steeped in controversy in the run-up to the festival following the decision of the Disney company to refuse permission to Miramax Films, which Disney owns, to distribute such a political hot potato in an election year.
At his overflowing press conference at Cannes yesterday, Moore refused to even entertain the use of the term, re-election, insisting that President Bush was not elected in the first place.
His film begins on US election night in November 2000, questioning the voting system in Florida that won the election for the president, but the film is principally concerned with the events of September 11th, 2001, and their aftermath.
Moore employs sound footage recorded at the World Trade Centre on that day and leaves the screen blank for that sequence, before turning to the president's reaction when he hears the news while visiting a junior school in Florida.
Using video footage shot by one of the teachers, it shows his blank response as he continues to read a child's book, My Pet Goat, for several minutes. The film frequently employs archive footage to present the president as a figure of ridicule. Unusually, Moore himself stays off-screen for most of the film, whereas he figured prominently in his earlier films such as the Oscar-winning Bowling For Columbine, the most commercially successful documentary ever released in the US.
"I always believe in having humour in my films, but this time I was the straight guy and Bush had all the funny lines," Moore said in Cannes.
In the tradition of Moore's earlier work, Fahrenheit 9/11 is a potent blending of broad humour and righteous anger, drawing audiences in to be entertained and sending them out thinking about and discussing what they have seen.
Showing footage of the president and of his father socialising with wealthy Saudi Arabian families, the film goes on to heavily criticise the decision to allow large numbers of Saudi Arabians, including 24 members of the bin Laden family, leave the US within days of the September 11th attacks, even though 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabian.
Moore posits his view that a climate of fear was fostered in the US after the attacks, allowing for the erosion of civil rights through the introduction of the Patriot Act.
The film interviews members of a middle-class peace group in Fresno who learned they had been infiltrated by anti-terrorism officer only when the officer's death in an accident was reported in the press, and it shows the people of a small Virginia town in an unlikely state of alert.
Much of the strongest material in the film was shot by freelance crews in Iraq, some embedded with US troops. Several soldiers who are interviewed openly express their disillusionment and despair with the war, and the film also features footage of US soldiers ridiculing Iraqi detainees, of Iraqi bombing victims and US soldiers who returned home mutilated, and of US families embittered with losing their sons in the war and questioning the need for them to be there in the first place.
"How come we can show all this, working with stringers and freelances, when the American TV networks don't show any of it?" Moore asked rhetorically yesterday.
Several US distributors are interested in acquiring the rights to the film.
The Irish release of the film is likely in August.