American Faust: From Condi to Neo-Condi

USA, 2009, 89 Minute Running Time
Genre/Subjects: African-American, Biopic, Colorado, Documentary, Political, Religion, Social Issues, Women's Issues
Language: English

MUST END Thursday, February 4
Digital presentation - British documentarian Sebastian Doggart’s scathing portrait of Condoleezza Rice takes the former US Secretary of State to task for ruthless ambition, opportunism, and incompetence. But the most damning charges against Rice concern the blind eye the University of Denver alumna turned to the warnings she received about Al Qaeda’s terrorism plots before 9/11 and the role she played in selecting and authorizing torture techniques during the Bush Administration’s misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Through interviews with supporters and critics alike (among them a DU professor), Doggart reveals his subject as a political chameleon held in thrall to a series of powerful men. These include the former president, who at one point explains in a high-level meeting that “Miss Rice is like my sister” – and whom she in turn once called her husband in an infamous Freudian slip. That relationship, the film says, allowed Bush’s then–national security advisor to maneuver around Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and even Vice President Dick Cheney.
While Congressman Robert Wexler accuses Rice of making “56 false or misleading public statements” about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and supposed Iraqi links to Al Qaeda, Doggart argues, for the record, that her piano playing lacked feeling, too.

DIRECTOR: Sebastian Doggart
Producer: Diana DeCilio, Sebastian Doggart
Editor: Diana DeCilio
Screenwriter: Sebastian Doggart
Cinematographer: Matthew Woolf
Principal Cast: Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, Lawrence Wilkerson
US Distributor: Indies Direct

Official Film Website