‘Promised Land,” a new movie from Matt Damon and John Krasinski, attacks fracking — a new way of getting oil and gas out of the ground, which has become the latest villain of the environmental movement.
Last week, I revealed the film’s co-writers, Damon and Krasinski, have gone to enormous lengths to twist the narrative to make American energy corporations the villain.
At the time, their efforts could be just passed off as just another Hollywood leftist fantasy to explain why the world is not how they think it should be.
But now a more sinister possibility has emerged. “Promised Land” is being financed by New Image Abu Dhabi — a company fully owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates.
The UAE is a small Arab kingdom with a spotty record on freedom-of-speech issues — and whose economy is completely dependent on selling oil and gas.
The UAE stands to lose trillions of dollars if fracking leads to increasing energy independence for the United States and Europe, as many analysts predict.
News of the UAE’s involvement in funding a Hollywood anti-fracking movie has been greeted with surprise by media outlets on the right but almost complete silence from the mainstream media.
Their “see no evil, report no evil” stance would be a lot easier to swallow if they were consistent. But no.
“Won’t Back Down,” a film just released at the weekend, casts a cold eye on the union-dominated public-school system. Starring Oscar winner Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal, it is an emotional, heartwarming tale of parents succeeding against the odds.
But many reviewers have focused on attacking the funding for the film.
The NPR reviewer called it a “propaganda piece . . . from a conservative mogul.” Slate.com’s critic called it an “agenda-driven piece of crap . . . financed by conservative Christian billionairePhil Anschutz.”
Strange, next to the utter lack of curiosity about funding for “Promised Land.”
Let me be clear here: Getting financing to make a movie is a pain. One of my documentaries was mostly funded by a mining company, with full disclosure. For others, I’ve gone to private individuals (always naming them) as well as the BBC, CBC and Ireland’s RTE.
For my current project, FrackNation (a documentary to tell the truth about fracking), I used the Web site kickstarter, and returned any donations from oil or gas industry executives — precisely to avoid issues like the ones that ought to be raised now with Damon and Krasinski.
Until the media start applying consistent standards and asking difficult questions about that film’s funding, we’ll never know if Matt Damon has gone from producing works of art to a new, more sinister type of film — a very different “movie on demand.”
Phelim McAleer is a journalist and documentary filmmaker.