The Elephant In The Room Documentary
The Elephant In The Room follows filmmaker Dean Puckett as he examines the cultural impact and paranoia that the events of 9/11 have had on British and American culture. From the 9/11 Truth Movement hoping to disseminate the evidence of the day, through the Muslim psyche in modern Britain, the film culminates in New York on the 6th anniversary, to see a nation torn apart by its Government’s lies and deceit over what exactly happened on the day.
WATCH THE TRAILER:
VISIT THE WEBSITE: http://www.nosmokewithoutfire.co.uk
The first documentary I made was called ’26 Miles and Running’, which was about my father running the New York Marathon, 8 weeks after 9/11. I was just 19 years old when I filmed it and have continued to make documentaries and short fiction films ever since.
My documentaries have always dealt with sections of society that are being marginalised or received negative press i.e. the elderly, people living with HIV, and fox hunters in Britain to name a few.
After seeing some of my work on the Internet a ’9/11 Truth’ group from East Anglia in Middle England contacted me asking if I would like to make a documentary about them hanging banners over motorway bridges that read ’Investigate 9/11’. I agreed finding the whole thing slightly amusing at the time that a group of people in England would do something like that.
This day of filming makes up the opening of the film which then spiralled into a feature which took me across Europe and back to New York for the 6th Anniversary of the attacks. Again, the documentary took an unexpected turn in direction when I met several first responders, who are sick and dying from the dust that they breathed in at Ground Zero in the weeks and months after 9/11.
This is not a film about ’conspiracy theories’
The Elephant In The Room is a documentary about the ’9/11 Truth Movement’, or more accurately, my experience of the movement. This whole filming process then lead me into meeting and documenting the plight of the first responders in New York. I don’t try and tell you what to think and it doesn’t matter to me if you think that the people in the film are talking rubbish. My only aim is to document my experience of this movement and related issues.
The first responders especially can at least be a topic of conversation that isn’t just dismissed off hand as conspiracy nonsense. Whatever your political beliefs are, the movement exists and it therefore deserves to be documented. I will no doubt be labelled as a ’conspiracy theorist’ by some, but my only aim was to make an honest and fair portrayal of my year making this film and the characters I met along the way.
The phrase ’the elephant in the room’ is an English idiom for an obvious truth that is being ignored or goes unaddressed. This is certainly true when talking of the ’9/11 Truth Movement’ and its handling by the mainstream media. This is by no means the only elephant in the room where the mainstream media is concerned, which is why it is extremely important for documentary filmmakers to tackle topics like this no matter how controversial they seem.
I hope that the film can be judged on its own merits and not be dismissed as conspiracy nonsense itself.
Dean Puckett
