Eugene Jarecki
Eugene Jarecki is an American award-winning filmmaker. In 2012, he has won Sundance Grand Jury awards for documentary The House I Live In. The film was screened at 2013 ZagrebDox. His prior film, Reagan (2011) won an Emmy Award. In 2010, Jarecki worked alongside Morgan Spurlock and Alex Gibney as director of a documentary film inspired by the bestselling book Freakonomics. Jarecki’s film Why We Fight, winner of the 2005 Sundance Grand Jury Prize and a Peabody Award, has been broadcasted in over forty countries, including 2006 ZagrebDox. The King (2017) is his latest documentary.
General sponsor
Why We Fight
Denmark, France, Great Britain, USA, Canada
2005, 99', color
Directed by:
Eugene Jarecki
Screenplay by:
Eugene Jarecki
Cinematography:
Cullman, Christopher Li, Étienne Sauret, May Ying Welsh, Brett Wiley, Foster Wiley
Edited by:
Nancy Kennedy
Music:
Robert Miller
Producers:
Eugene Jarecki, Susannah Shipman
Festivals & Awards:
BBC Storyville, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Charlotte Street Films, TV2 Danmark, arte During World War II, the U.S. government made a series of propaganda films called ‘Why We Fight’. Jarecki is using the same title for the film in which he studies the rules and conventions of the wartime. As a starting point, he uses the 1961 statement of Dwight Eisenhower (from his second term as the president). It is a statement about the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens at all costs, using all the military resources available. In an interesting way, the director is trying to show how the government’s interests today are somewhat different from the interests of the citizens that it is so vigilantly trying to protect, and that modern American citizens are facing a new, mutant imperial style which tends to meet the growing corporate appetites rather than the needs of citizens.
