"U.N. Me" hits the road

There was a very interesting piece over at Big Hollywood about film festival life by Ami Horowitz, the director of U.N. Me, which is a documentary about the “incompetence and corruption” at the United Nations. Film festival’s are kind of weird places — fun, don’t get me wrong, but definitely weird — and he gets to the heart of why:

To truly understand the atmosphere of a film festival, you have to understand the bubble that is the film festival generally, and documentary film festival in particular. This is not to pass judgment on it, but rather to simply point out the fact that they live in an inviolable envelope of political homogeneity and when something shakes their world view the tremors are felt throughout the festival. That is exactly what we did.

Imagine going back to college and being surrounded by nothing but professors of postmodern literature, anthropology and virulently anti-war student groups, and you’ll have an idea of what the average festival is like. Consider, for example, the sort of questions Horowitz received after the first screening:

The Q&A took place immediately after the credits finished rolling the first question was emblematic of the rest of the evening. It began with a very angry man standing up and accusing me of being an American puppet and willfully ignoring the globe’s most egregious abusers of human rights. He then sat down obviously pleased with himself, with a pretentious smirk on his face. When I asked the man to name the countries to which he was referring, he boldly and without a hint of irony, named the United States and Israel.

Anyway, I’ve been hearing about U.N. Me for years now from various folks so I’m glad to see it’s getting some play at festivals. With any luck it’ll come to Silverdocs as well, so I’ll finally have a chance to see it.