Another Chance to see ‘Better This World’ on POV 30 August

“Both of us are very proud to be Americans and when you see someone is poisoning what you love, and what you believe in, I think if you allow yourself, you become someone who wants to fight against it.” As David McKay describes his thinking, you might think you know where Better This World is headed. McKay and Brad Crowley, two friends from Midland, Texas, tell a story that seems familiar: as young activists, they were arrested at the Republican National Convention in 2008. As the film unfolds, they’re fighting their legal cases. At the time, which is to say, after 9/11, says FBI Assistant Special Agent Tim Gossfeld, domestic terrorism was a specific target: “That is what we need to focus all our resources on,” he asserts, “to the best of our ability.”

Re-airing on PBS’ PPV series beginning 30 August, Better This World assembles pieces of Crowley and McKay’s experiences. In Minnesota, surveillance camera footage shows them shopping for Molotov cocktail makings at a Walmart. Though they assemble eight of them, as they tell it, they never intended to use them. Their rooms are raided and they’re arrested, and, as Special Agent Christopher Langert puts it, the FBI stops two men who “were going to try to block delegates, cause destruction and other felony criminal activity.” The story becomes more complicated, the documentary is increasingly focused on that complexity, on the competing versions of events and especially, different understandings of events. Tragically, as the government digs in, these complexities are repressed and reframed to suit a simpler version of the case, a version that can be made in court.

See PopMatters‘ review.