Homegrown is a documentary about three American patriots who love their country, revere Donald Trump and balk at the result of the 2020 presidential election. Director Michael Premo spent months trailing his subjects – Chris, Thad and Randy – in the run-up to the attack on the Capitol building of 6 January 2021, and his illuminating, gripping film looks back at a dark period of recent US history. Implicitly, though, it also warns of further unrest.
“I think January 6th was just the warm-up,” Premo says. “This November, we’re going to see an even more frantic and desperate attempt to attack every level of the electoral system.” He is not optimistic about the US’s current direction of travel. The country, he argues, is effectively on the brink of civil war.
Homegrown premieres at this year’s Venice film festival. It is one of a number of campaigning political pictures that could put the event at loggerheads with Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right Italian government. Joining it on the programme is Separated, Errol Morris’s documentary about family separation on the US’s southern border; Dani Rosenberg’s harrowing Gaza-themed drama Of Dogs and Men; and Olha Zhurba’s Songs of Slow Burning Earth, which is billed as an audiovisual diary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
(There is no release date yet as the doc is making the rounds of film festivals).
J6 was largely the product of the DCPD thinking all those Blue Lives bumper sticker folks weren’t going to start cracking heads the moment they decided the police had Gone Woke. You had cops lowering barricades, opening doors, ushering J6ers inside, and even taking selfies shortly before things to heated. Not a coincidence that many of the rioters were, themselves, current or former police or military personal.
Some of those who work forces…