Love him or hate him, controversial filmmaker Michael Moore is back with a new documentary, this time looking at how other countries have found tangible solutions to the problems plaguing America.
Originally released in December to select theaters in New York and Los Angeles, Where to Invade Next re-opens across the country Feb. 12. According to the film’s website, it’ll be making its sole South Carolina stop at the Palmetto Grand Stadium 16 in Mount Pleasant.
Told in the style of a European travelogue, the movie follows the Oscar-winning filmmaker from Italy to France to Iceland as he talks with locals about healthy public school lunches, paid maternity leave, and free college education. The concept behind the film is that the writer, producer, director is storming these foreign lands in order to lay claim to their best ideas and practices — all in order to return to America with a few helpful suggestions for solving the nation’s woes.
While the filmmaker best known for tackling America’s complicated relationship with guns in Bowling for Columbine and 2004’s record-breaking Fahrenheit 9/11 hasn’t always had the best luck changing hearts and minds, he seems confident that the ideas presented in the movie could take hold here in the United States.
“I’m not making a policy film, I’m making a human film. I’m showing the humanism of how they decide to treat their children in Finland and how the French do not poison their children at lunch,” Moore said in a New York Times interview. “If enough people leave all stirred up, if just 10 percent of them go to the next PTA meeting and say, ‘Hey, why don’t we start doing lunch differently and get local farmers and do this?’ that is going to motivate people to do something.”
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