New York investment banker-turned-filmmaker Ami Horowitz, director of the United Nations corruption and dysfunction exposé U.N. Me, describes the moment he decided to ditch Wall Street for the documentary world as an “epiphany”.
“I was at home one Saturday night watching Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and for some reason I started thinking about the U.N., I don’t know why, about how it had failed in places like Rwanda, the Sudan, in stemming human rights abuses... I got really upset. I was thinking, how can I actualize these feelings? I looked up at Bowling for Columbine and there was my answer. By the next morning, it was clear to me I had to leave my job at the bank to make this film,” Horowitz recounts.
Undeterred by the fact he was a wannabe filmmaker with no prior experience, Horowitz set about enlisting some of the most respected crew in New York, including cinematographers Wolfgang Held, whose recent work includes Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story and Bruno, and Bob Richman, whose credits include Metallica: Some Kind of Monster and An Inconvenient Truth.
“I made a list of the best documentaries I had ever seen, looked at the top talent, got their phone numbers and invited them for a cup of coffee,” says Horowitz. The resulting documentary is an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek investigation of the United Nation’s activities; with a sting in the tail. Horowitz focuses on four main areas where he believes the U.N. has failed: peacekeeping, nuclear proliferation, human rights abuses/genocide and corruption. Along the way, he goes on a behind the scenes tour of the U.N. New York HQ, as well as to the war-torn Ivory Coast, to probe U.N. operations there, including an alleged massacre of civilians by peacekeepers.
“We spend a bit of time looking at the bits of the institution that do work properly – although not as much as some people would like. When you’ve only got 90 minutes, you can’t cover everything and in any case I’ve never made any bones about the point of this film. We had a point of view we wanted to prove,” Horowitz comments. This “point of view” has made Horowitz few friends on the U.S. film festival circuit, where the film has yet to get a single screening.
“I thought the festivals were open-minded, looking for different kinds of points of views. But the only diversity of opinions they want is that which lies within spectrum of the things they already believe in. A lot of them regarded it as a right-wing movie. I don’t think it is, but because criticism of the U.N. has traditionally been a banner of the right, I guess they assumed this is also the case here.”
And the man who first inspired him to enter the documentary world in the first place – has he seen the movie? “Well, Michael lives in my building and we know each other. I used a lot of his team. He keeps telling me he wants to see it... I’m sure he will at some points,” Horowitz says.
Melanie Goodfellow
20/11 21.30 Munt 10
24/11 13.15 Munt 11
26/11 9.45 Tuschinski 3
28/11 17.00 Tuschinski 4