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February 15, 2019

IDA Conversation Series: Eugene Jarecki


Eugene Jarecki is an award-winning documentary director and producer whose films investigate American politics and its power structures. His 2002 film, The Trials of Henry Kissinger, based on a book by Christopher Hitchens, that illustrates former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as a warmonger responsible for multiple military cover-ups. The 2005 Peabody Award- and Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning film, Why We Fight, examines the rise and maintenance of the United States military–industrial complex. The House I Live In, which also won a Peabody Award and Sundance Grand Jury Prize, analyzes the country’s unfair drug policies and its racial and class implications. In this conversation, Jarecki also discusses his latest documentary, THE KING, a musical road trip across America in Elvis Presley’s 1963 Rolls-Royce in which Jarecki talks to Americans of all walks of life to paint a visionary portrait of the state of the American dream.