Listen 8:00- 9:00 pm (PST) to the WeThePeopleRadioNetwork.com and to our guest- Samira Goetschel.
Listen 9:00- 10:00 pm (PST) to the WeThePeopleRadioNetwork.com and to our guest- Paul Krik.
Samira Goetschel is the director of Our Own Private Bin Laden, her first full length documentary, made over a three-year time span. It explores Osama bin Laden's rise to notoriety without using a single image of its subject. It won the award for Best Foreign Documentary & Best Film of the Festival (non-European category) at the 2006, The European Independent Film Festival Paris, France and The Audience Award at the 2006, International Documentary Festival Seoul, South Korea.
Samira Goetschel was born in Iran and fled the country with her family after her father was executed by the government of Ayatollah Khomeini. She spent her formative years in the United States. An alumnus of New York University film school, Goetschel's graduating film Clown De La Vie was the Best Short Film winner at the 1992 New York State Film Festival. She earned a Masters of Arts degree at Columbia University, and followed her passion for filmmaking with the short film ¿ about the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC.
Samira interviews an extraordinary array of people in her film including:
Saad Al-Fagih
Founder and the President of the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia (MIRA)
Milton Bearden
Former CIA Chief of the Soviet/East European Division, the CIA Station Chief in Pakistan during the Reagan Administration
Benazir Bhutto
Former Prime Minster of Pakistan
Jack Blum
Former Special Counsel to the United States Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations
Zbigniew Brzezinski
President Carter's National Security Advisor
Noam Chomsky
American linguist & political activist
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
American journalists and authors of "The Voice" and "Afghanistan, the End of Illusion"
Paul Krik wrote, produced, directed & edited ABLE DANGER, his first feature film. In describing his film he wrote:
"...Documentaries are invaluable at exposing the truth, but they tend to reach the audience that is already listening. To reach a wider audience the message needs to be sugar coated. More people are reached by a gripping story and stylized filmmaking with beautiful and talented actors. Which is what I've undertaken to achieve. But this story is grounded in truth. The places are real. Vox Pop is a real cafe owned by a real man named Sander Hicks who publishes and sells books that the mainstream media won't touch. He is a level headed, rational and passionate real life Don Quixote still researching detail by irrepressible detail the truth of 911, election fraud, and everything else we should be infuriated about. As the sign above his door reads, 'Coffee, Books, Democracy.' This film is the fictional story of 'what if a femme fatale came into Vox Pop cafe with undeniable proof that 911 was an inside job?' It is a tribute to the people who fight the inevitable demise of American democracy.
Able Danger is a very real but little known private intelligence program that destroyed 2.5 terrabytes of data detailing the financial support network of Al Qaeda six months before 9/11."
Paul Krik spent a year on his bicycle touring the United States coast to coast from San Francisco to New Orleans in the year between earning his BA in Philosophy at Oberlin College and his MA at the University of Illlinois. He moved to Hamburg, wrote screenplays and worked in television, and then back to the US, to Los Angeles to make movies. In LA he quickly gave up marketing himself as writer and learned filmmaking at the School of Hard Knocks -- TV Commercial Production. He produced national TV commercials for a few years while building his 'Commercial Director's Reel'. He changed the title of the spec reel from 'Director' to 'Editor' and immediately took a job at TBWA Chiat/Day in San Francisco running their editorial department. He's been cutting national TV spots for more than 10 years now. Currently he lives with his German wife and ABLE DANGER co-producer, Katharina Lang, in New York -- where ABLE DANGER was shot. He is on staff at Jump Editorial (www.nycjump.com) in NOHO, New York City, where he edited the film as well.
Paul Krik's film is a riveting, fast paced, dramatic, action packed, beautifully produced artistic masterpiece. It weaves fact with fiction, reality and the surreal, the truth with half truths. There are obvious lies, white lies, black lies, innocent lies, deliberate lies lacing the dialogue, obscuring the truth, blurring the truth, protecting people, endangering people, tricking people, a labyrinth of manipulation, as if each person were a pawn in a great game, not knowing who is calling the moves, or how many players are competing. Throw in the sex, seduction, passions, intelligence operatives, cops, investigators, victims, bribery, money, and a plot moving so fast that the main character probably can’t figure out his own emotions between the competing fear, grief, terror, pain, pleasure, relief, uncertainty of an ever changing landscape of challenges.
When I finished watching it, my immediate reaction was the urge to see it again- to catch the details I had missed and to ponder and grok it more completely. It works and hopefully will reach a wider audience than the "documentary in church basement crowds." (Link to my review of the film).
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