ERASE AND FORGET explores ‘the deep bonds between Hollywood’s fictionalized conflicts and America’s hidden wars’ through a complex portrayal of US soldier, whistle-blower and ex-presidential candidate Bo Gritz, one of America’s highest decorated veterans, the ‘inspiration’ behind figures such as RAMBO and Brando’s Colonel Kurtz (APOCALYPSE NOW). ERASE AND FORGET explores the implications on a personal and collective level of identities founded on a profound, even endemic violence. It examines the propagation of that violence through Hollywood and the mass media, the arms trade and ongoing governmental policy. ERASE AND FORGET proposes a multi-layered investigation of war as a social structure, a way of being for individuals and countries in what is becoming an era of ‘permanent conflict’.

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Cinema release and VOD by LUX: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/eraseandforget

Top of the 5 British Artists films of 2018 to see / SIGHT&SOUND 2019

Olaf Möller/SENSES OF CINEMA voted ERASE AND FORGET ​film of the year 2017

Barbara Wurm/SENSES OF CINEMA voted ERASE AND FORGET a film of the year 2017 in Senses of Cinema

FINANCIAL TIMES​ ★★★★
The film is so loopy you end up like Laocoön, wreathed by serpents of paradox and contradiction.

TOTAL FILM​ ★★★★
like a Lynchian nightmare of right-wing America

EMPIRE​ ★★★★
Zimmermann marshals her material...with relentlessly thought-provoking confidence. disconcerting documentary, which also doubles as an insight into the American mindset that led to the election of Donald Trump
shrewd use of rare archive footage

TIME OUT​ ★★★★
an especially probing portrait of a wounded man and his role in the fetishisation of state-sanctioned violence

FILMUFORIA​ ★★★★
This illuminating portrait of a rather broken champion is enriched by extraordinary archive footage.

MORNING STAR​ ★★★★
Gripping and jaw-dropping, it's a documentary that needs to be seen to be believed.

EVENING STANDARD ★★★
Bo's nonchalance when talking about his behaviour in countries such as Panama makes your jaw drop

CINESTHESIA
Zimmerman wants us to interrogate those images of conflict others would simply have us consume; there may be no easy way to swallow her montage of actual historical atrocities, here is someone who stands for the America of 2018 better than anyone in this year's Best Picture nominees.

FRIEZE
Erase and Forget reflects the kind of ideological instability that has contributed to the US's surreal political moment.
A portrait of Gritz as a kind of cipher for evolving 20th century American ideologies.
Zimmerman not only acknowledges the fiction at the heart of Gritz’s narrative, she frames it in terms of shifting visual forms.

SIGHT AND SOUND
an eerie, quietly disturbing essay film that probes the erasures and edge spaces of the American Dream what makes it so distinctive is the understated fashion with which it marries private to political unhappiness

VARIETY
This is a new way to make a documentary, exploiting the bountiful public record of the Internet age.It captures how Gritz anticipated the insanity of today. At the time, Gritz’s actions seemed laughable, but in the age of the ultimate trumped up reality showman (namely Donald Trump), they seem like an early version of the virus that ate our sanity.

OBSERVER
Defiance, depression, delusion: ​Erase & Forget​ touches on all these ideas, showing how the fog of war can spin into a mental disease

More info here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6075734/