Chapters
Just four months into the making of this film, the funding for our first year of research and photography ran out. Part of that was my fault. I had been a bit too optimistic about how far we could stretch each Euro because I wanted so badly to get this project off the ground. The rest of the extraneous spending came from unexpected costs. Pricey hotel rooms, exorbitant taxi cab fares, unmarked tolls, bribes, taxes, equipment registration. Key lime pie. Even with my tiny crew the idea of taking on the entire former United States in one go seems, well, naive. Reluctantly, we packed up all the footage and equipment we hadn't already mailed back to England and boarded a plane for home.
It would be another seven months before I could secure enough resource for a second trip. In the meantime I busied myself with reviewing the raw content, making notes for the eventual editing process and even recording a bit of the voice work for the final product. It felt so strange to do all that work when there was so much we hadn't seen, so many questions we still needed to answer. I'm not going to go so far as to say we spent four months in North America and hadn't even scratched the surface. To be honest, we got more information than has ever been captured by other journalistic endeavors. It was rather like leaving a meal after only finishing the first course. I was still unsatisfied. I was still hungry.
In retrospect, there was at least one blessing to being called home earlier than expected. In reviewing the interview footage we had gathered on the trip I began to notice what one might call "tics" and inconsistencies. I wasn't so foolish as to believe we would be told the absolute truth wherever we went, but I was surprised at the places in which I noticed the signs of dishonesty. People who seemed to have no reason to lie had told us things that simply weren't true. This was not restricted to the halls of power. Some of the people who seemed the most humble turned out to be the most dubious. Bold as it may seem to say it before proffering the evidence, there are lies in America, great lies that threaten to swallow what I am convinced is the most important political development of the century. That in mind, my mission for this project changed, however slightly. I set out to unearth the true history of the American Transition. After the first trip ended, I resolved to do just that, but also to reveal the way certain individuals attempted to smudge the records of history before they were even written. Along the way we ended up making friends, and enemies, in strange places.
End of Segment I: America Wakes. Coming soon, Segment II: Lies in America
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