We just talked live with my friends the filmmakers Zackary Canepari and Jessica Dimmock about their extraordinary and chilling new documentary, Thoughts & Prayers: How to Survive an Active Shooter in America, which premieres tonight on HBO (and begins streaming on HBO Max) at 9 p.m. Eastern.
It’s an incredibly powerful documentary film that looks at the crisis of gun violence — and does so in a way that’s completely novel.
Instead of doing the obvious thing, which is to make a documentary arguing how bad the problem is, which is easy to do on this subject, they did a totally different thing.
They documented with great deadpan artistic restraint an America that has chosen to live with guns, that has chosen to accept that our children will be shot in schools, that we will lose friends and neighbors. They document a country that has decided that this crisis is, as they put it in the film, more like a hurricane than a policy choice.
And in a chilling and even moving way, they depict what a country would do, and in fact is doing, as it chooses to view guns that way. Stage increasingly elaborate mass-shooter drills in schools. Subject children to regular mass-death training. Sell schools products to minimize the death toll from shootings that are held to be inevitable.
This is America, so the gun crisis becomes, in Canepari and Dimmock’s telling, a chance to sell more products to deal with the problem caused by existing products, rather than an occasion to reflect on the wisdom of living with guns to begin with.
This film ultimately becomes a biopsy of the American soul. It’s incredibly powerful work. Here is the trailer. And I urge you to watch tonight, or anytime thereafter.
You won’t want to miss Thoughts & Prayers, or this conversation with the filmmakers. Just click on the video player above to watch the entire conversation.
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Join us for more Live conversation this week!
Join us tomorrow, Wednesday, November 18, when The Ink Book Club meets with author and filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat, who’ll talk about his new book, We Survived the Night.
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