Episode 28 - Adam Benzine - “What's Happening Brother”

UK FilmmakersCanadian FilmmakersJournalistsAgnostic Filmmakers

Aug 27

August 27, 2021

In this episode, I speak with Oscar-Nominated, United Kingdom-born, and Canada-based filmmaker Adam Benzine. During the episode, we chat about his career in journalism, his move to Canada, his critically acclaimed work, Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah, and his latest documentary project, The Curve, which is about the first 90-days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Because in so many ways the battles we are facing now so closely resemble those are parents and grandparents fought in the past, this episode’s song is Marvin Gaye’s timeless classic, “What’s Happening Brother.” Adam specifically connects to the following lyrics from the song, “When will people start gettin' together again? Are things really gettin' better, like the newspaper said? What else is new my friend? Besides what I read. Can't find no work, can't find no job, my friend. Money is tighter than it's ever been. Say, man, I just don't understand What's going on across this land.” Our conversation was recorded in July 2021.

Photo Credit: Alison Boulier

[Image Description: Adam is pictured from the torso up. He wears a dark-colored long-sleeved sweater over a light-colored button-down shirt. He holds a white mug in his hands just beneath his chin. He gazes to the left. The photo is in B&W.]

Film Still: The Curve

[image description: In a still from THE CURVE, former CDC director Ali S. Kahn discusses the U.S. government's failure in responding to COVID-19. Former President Trunk is pictured next to him.]

Adam’s Bio

Adam Benzine is an Academy Award-nominated, British-Canadian filmmaker and journalist, based in Toronto. As a filmmaker, he
made last year's groundbreaking COVID-19 documentary The Curve, as well as the Oscar-, Grierson- and IDA-nominated HBO documentary Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah, which recently became the first motion picture to be turned into an NFT.
As a journalist, he has written for publications such as the National Post, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The Independent, MOJO, Music Week, Realscreen, The Hollywood Reporter, Indiewire, and Variety.

About The Curve

In the first major creative documentary covering America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Oscar®-nominated director Adam Benzine and an all-star creative team trace the decisions and mistakes made by the U.S. government over a crucial three-month period, using a creative blend of interviews, archival material, and original music.

Told in the style of investigative thriller, The Curve embraces a tense, urgent soundtrack and a visual mix of intense news coverage and looming panorama shots, to trace the 90-day period from January 15, 2020 – when a plane lands in Seattle carrying the first known American infected with COVID-19 – to April 13 (Easter Monday), when the death toll began to spiral out of control.

The film boasts interviews with more than two dozen experts, analysts, researchers, journalists, and political figures, including Dr. Ali Khan, former director of the CDC’s Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response; Dr. Mosaka Fallah, the most recent Director General for the National Public Health Institute of Liberia; Sonia Shah, investigative journalist; Ilan Goldenberg, U.S. State Department Advisor for the Obama administration; and journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic.

At the centre of the documentary is an unemotional assessment of the mistakes made by the U.S. in responding to this crisis, from a failure to take the pandemic threat sufficiently seriously, mixed messaging broadcast to the public, a downplaying or negating of expert and medical recommendations, a poorly implemented border closure, a deadly delay in implementing a widespread lockdown, and – most damning of all – a devastating failure to procure sufficient Personal Protective Equipment and distribute COVID-19 testing kits.

Tense, heartbreaking, introspective, and poetic, The Curve serves as a thriller, a disaster movie, an investigative exposé, a meditative reflection, and something altogether new in the non-fiction landscape.