We are delighted to share the news that the film Erase and Forget  by Andrea Luka Zimmerman, supported by The Wapping Project, has been selected for the Focus Programme: Around Masculinity at the 35th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.

From the alpha male to toxic masculinity, the focus program Around Masculinity interrogates the problematic social construct that is masculinity from a variety of perspectives. The curated section homes in on a blind spot in film history, inviting audiences to take a hard look at their heroes by re-reading classics.

Erase and Forget  will screen on 14 and 18 November.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s Erase and Forget partakes in what I would term masculinity ‘under erasure’. Filmed over a decade, it relates the story of James Gordon ‘Bo’ Gritz (one of the most highly decorated soldiers in American military history, and the supposed real-life inspiration for cinematic heroes such as Rambo) and his growing disillusionment with American politics and conservative cultural identity. Masculinity comes to be understood as a destructive form of madness, a traumatic wound, that is both the direct product and casualty of a relentlessly patriarchal, patriotic, and paranoid form of political ideology. Zimmerman’s cinematic triumph lies in the ways in which she reveals the imbrication of America’s hidden wars with the cinematic image itself. 

Writes Anna Backman Rogers in her essay Masculinities on screen: Sites of contestation and vulnerability, published by the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam on 18 October 2022.