C.S.A. Confederate States of America (2004)

I must confess to being a huge fan of the genre of alternative history, though, I hasten to add, not in the rose-tinted and reality denying vein of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. However this film could almost be seen as a spiritual successor to Griffith's film, nearly a century on, this time played for satire rather than an attempt to misrepresent history. Really, it's very well written and acted mockumentary, creating a fairly plausible world in which a combination of American isolationism and saturation of the culture with propaganda have allowed people to still accept slavery as a norm. Few would argue that the America we see is a massive regression from the America of our experience, warts and all; alliance with Hitler, a pre-emptive attack on the Japanese, imperial expansionism into South America and, of course, the mostly uncontested continuation of slavery up until the present day. Sadly the historical narrative is marred by a few glaring flaws, not least the lack of mention of the U.S.S.R. (and no mention of why it would fail to emerge) resulting in a Cold War with abolitionist Canada instead, and no explanation as to how Britain would have survived a World War II with no American assistance. That being said, overall this is an extremely enjoyable film, really only marred by problems of structure rather than content. The mockumentary is broken up by spoof commercial breaks for various products, mostly real products from before the 1950s, featuring some of the hammiest and least credible (even for advertisements) performances I have ever witnessed, including the worst not-Martha Stewart in human history. It breaks the flow of the narrative and is a black mark on what is otherwise a very compelling and engaging movie.


And they still found time to fake the moon landings!