Shadows of Liberty

Securing permits and locking down streets in the DC metro area isn’t an easy task, but BBC Smoking Dogs Films; the film and television production company founded in London ,1998, by three members of the acclaimed British cinecultural group Black Audio Film Collective. The founders of the company are film director John Akomfrah and producers Lina Gopaul and David Lawson.

Smoking Dogs Films was conceived to produce works of imagination and innovation within the fertile worlds of film, television and new technologies and they has no problem contracting DC Video producer Don Napoleon to assist in securing permits and understanding the do’s and don’t when shooting film in the Nations Capitol. Stories of corporate greed winning out over media values are hand-over-mouth shocking, told with clarity and focus where the film could descend into angry, polemical journalism. So you have the tale of CBS canning a story about Nike’s Vietnamese sweatshops because of Nike’s sponsorship in the station’s Winter Olympics coverage, or the story of the journalist led to suicide because lapdog media corporations bullied his newspaper into dropping his article, one posing a potential threat to the White House. And while the speculation regarding the Navy downing TWA Flight 800 borders on conspiracy theory presented as fact, Shadows of Liberty’s message is ‘trust no-one – especially not the American government’, and will bring you round if you didn’t think it already. Shadows of Liberty became somewhat buried underneath the more high profile productions at the festival (ironic for a doc predominantly about how controversial news stories are buried by large corporations), but managed to make more impact on me than any of them.

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Website: http://shadowsofliberty.org/