The Untold History of the United States

After four demanding years in the works, last year Oliver Stone presented television viewers with a compilation documentary series (10 hour-long episodes) focusing on certain aspects of modern US history. Stone, as director, producer, and narrator, remains faithful in this ambitious project to his reputation as a controversial artist who promotes his own view of historical events: although many of them were pooh-poohed or downplayed by the American media at the time, they fundamentally influenced the trajectory of American history and the situation in the world today. Helping Stone on the series were British screenwriter Matt Graham and American historian Peter Kuznick. Together they integrated known and lesser-known facts from the mid-20th century onward in order to trace the role of the USA as a superpower advancing its own aggressive and grasping goals across a wide range of historical situations. The Second World War, dropping the atom bomb on Japan, the Cold War and relations with the Soviet Union, the Vietnam War, the shift toward US global hegemony after the fall of communism, and the War on Terror – these are the events that Stone and his team document using unique, often obscure archive materials. But the film also includes photographs, sound recordings, and illustrative scenes from the classic Hollywood movies of Frank Capra and Henry King. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)