An urgent and fascinating documentary. Even if you belong to the choir it’s preaching to, it has the rare distinction of being a film you can agree and argue with at the same time. I.F. Stone, a trend-setting investigative journalist, was highly influential through his self-published newsletter, I.F. Stone’s Weekly. He tweaked and railed against the sins of the U.S. government and the mainstream media. Stone didn’t call government officials, and wasn’t even accredited to attend a White House press conference. Instead, he went into back rooms and pored through documents and transcripts to learn what was really going on. In the film, Michael Moore compares Stone to Toto in The Wizard of Oz, tugging back the curtain to reveal the power elite hiding behind their image of authority. The film is mostly devoted to the pluck and courage of his present-day inheritors such as Laura Poitras, Amy Goodman, Glenn Greenwald among others – all of whom are carrying on the tradition of renegade muckraking that Stone almost single-handedly put on the map in the postwar era. Director Fred Peabody, whose film The Corporate Coup D’Etat was shown at VTIFF in 2020, succeeds in creating a lively film that suggests that I.F. Stone’s kind of fearless reporting has not disappeared but may be gaining traction. ~OY
*** Followed by Q&A with the director Fred Peabody and with the co-producer Jeff Cohen***