PODCAST | Chiara Nicoletti interviews Eugene Jarecki, director of Promised Land.
As a special event, the 70th Cannes Film Festival presents Promised Land, a documentary by Eugene Jarecki . On FRED the director describes the genesis of the film and its being more about American history narrated through the representative of the American dream: Elvis Presley. A nostalgic but rational road-trip through America to talk about how people have changed since then and how American society became what it is today.
Promised Land: set against the 2016 presidential election, Promised Land takes a musical road trip across America in Elvis Presley’s 1963 Rolls Royce. The mission, forty years after the singer’s death, is to find the country he left behind – a nation that, like Elvis, started out young, beautiful, and promising, yet succumbed over time to the corrosive influences of addiction, money, and power. Promised Land paints a cultural portrait of the American dream at a critical time in the nation’s history. It explores, through music and verité, how a country boy lost his authenticity and became a “King,” while his country lost her democracy and became an empire.
For the official page of the film in the festival,
click here.