Hot Docs 2019 Reviews: The Corporate Coup d’Etat, Killing Patient Zero, and Framing John DeLorean

May 03, 2019- Permalink

The Corporate Coup d’Etat

The Corporate Coup d’Etat, from director Fred Peabody, examines how much control companies have over the political process and public policy. The phrase “corporate coup d’etat” was coined by John Ralston Saul in 1995 and this doc shows how little control individuals have over their lives. We may vote and think we’re making a change but how much of that is just theatre? There’s a clip in the doc from the film Network where the Ned Beatty character sums it up pretty well: “You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.” We see towns devastated by closures and the people who still believe they’ll be rescued by politicians. The real sense of dread comes with the realization that the ship of democracy may have already set sail.

Laurie Lynd’s Killing Patient Zero takes us back to 1981, just seven years after homosexuality had been declassified as a mental illness in North America. When AIDS hit, it was called the “gay plague”, jokes were made at White House briefings, and society ignored the problems as thousands died. As misinformation and homophobia spread, a Canadian flight attendant named Gaétan Dugas was wrongly vilified as “Patient Zero”. Through interviews with social and research figures from the era and archival footage we see how one man became the victim of weaponized media and political groups bent on attacking the people rather than solving the problem.

Framing John DeLorean, from directors Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce, tracks the meteoric rise and precipitous fall of famed auto designer John DeLorean, who designed a revolutionary car, started his own factories and was busted for cocaine smuggling when he needed money to save the firm. Using interviews with business associates and family members and using dramatizations with Alec Baldwin, the filmmakers try to get to the bottom of what motivated the man. It’s interesting enough, with Baldwin sometimes stepping out of character to try and work out DeLorean’s motivation, but I found myself wanting either a straight documentary, or a full on biopic, like a variation on last year’s TIFF film Driven, which had Lee Pace as the automaker and Jason Sudeikis as the FBI informant who brought him down.