Back in January, President Trump said that he had the coronavirus outbreak “totally under control.” Approximately 73 months later, over 200,000 Americans are dead and cases are back on the rise after a summer slowdown — oh yeah, and as we learned on Thursday night, Trump tested positive for the virus. In that sense, Alex Gibney, the Emmy- and Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker behind Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and indie distributor Neon couldn’t have picked a more apt day to release the trailer for Totally Under Control.
In the documentary, Gibney, along with co-directors Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, examines the government’s “beyond incompetent” response to dealing with COVID-19; it did not “just disappear,” shockingly. “With damning testimony from public health officials and hard investigative reporting, Gibney exposes a system-wide collapse caused by a profound dereliction of Presidential leadership,” Neon notes.
Here’s more:
On January 20th, 2020, the U.S. and South Korea both discovered their first cases of COVID-19. However, 9 months later, the novel Coronavirus has claimed the lives of over 200,000 Americans and caused staggering economic damage, while in South Korea, there were no significant lockdowns and, in an urbanized population of 51 million, only 344 lives have been lost. Where did we go wrong?
As the presidential election nears, Americans are increasingly enraged by a lack of clear leadership, endemic political corruption, and left to wonder how did the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world manage to fail so thoroughly in its response to a global pandemic? … It will be a generation before we know the full extent of the damage wrought by this pandemic, but Totally Under Control will stand as the definitive account of the Trump administration’s incompetence, corruption, and denial in the face of this global pandemic.
Totally Under Control premieres on On Demand on October 13 and Hulu on October 20.