‘D.O.A.P.’ shoots for US release

Death of a President (D.O.A.P.), the UK TV movie that became one of the most controversial and buzzed-about films at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, has been snapped up by Newmarket Films for release in the US. The mockumentary, which spawned hundreds of headlines even before its screening (like Snakes On A Plane, or S.O.A.P, oddly enough), recreates and reexamines the assassination of current President George W. Bush by a Syrian sniper in Chicago. Newmarket, amongst whose other releases are Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4Eva, Whale Rider, and Christopher Nolan’s
Memento and upcoming The Prestige, is evidently not worried about the impending foot-stomping, boycotting, and loud voices that Conservative America will no doubt expound at selected theatres when this film is actually released.

Gabriel Range, the director of D.O.A.P. and a TV movie veteran, is no stranger to making films that speculate on hypothetical political troubles. His previous TV movie, The Man Who Broke Britain, creates a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia that cripples the world’s oil production, sending the US and UK in a great economic depression. In D.O.A.P., Range will investigate the unsolved assassination of Bush through a series of interviews with “suspects” and those who were responsible for “finding the assassin.” Using recreations and CGI, liberals and left wingers alike will laugh and cheer as their favorite president ever will be killed in the name of cinema. For fans of Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park, this is the film you’ve been waiting for. I’m still trying to figure out if D.O.A.P. is pronounced ‘dope,’ and whether or not that is intentional, given the subject of the film.