Airdate: Movie: Bowling for Columbine

ABC2 will screen Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine this Sunday night as part of its Sunday Best showcase.

ABC2 indicates that this is a premiere*, despite the film being made in 2002.

Nevertheless given recent news events in the US no doubt it, sadly, still holds a degree of relevance.

Bowling For Columbine is an alternately humorous and horrifying film about the United States.

It is a film about the state of the Union, and the violent soul of America. Why do 11,000 people die in America each year at the hands of gun violence?

The talking heads yelling from every TV camera blame everything from Satan to video games. But is the US all that different from many other countries? What sets the U.S. apart? How have they become both the masters and the victims of such enormous amounts of violence?

This is not a film about gun control – it is a film about the fearful heart and soul of the United States, and the 280 million Americans lucky enough to have the right to a constitutionally protected Uzi.

Bowling For Columbine was the first documentary film accepted into the competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 46 years. The Cannes jury unanimously awarded it the 55th Anniversary Prize.

From a look at the Columbine High School security camera tapes, to the home of Oscar-winning NRA President Charlton Heston; from a young man who makes homemade napalm with The Anarchist’s Cookbook to the murder of a six-year-old girl by another six-year-old, Bowling for Columbine’s a journey through America. Moore hopes to discover through its past why America’s pursuit of happiness is so riddled with violence.

8:30pm Sunday, 1 June ABC2.

(previously screened on Seven*).