30/08/2024 - VENICE 2024: Artist and Occupy activist Michael Premo’s documentary is a chilling, if familiar, dispatch from the USA’s late Trump era

With the next US election imminent on 5 November – billed depressingly, like the last few, as a choice between tyranny and democracy – artist and onetime Occupy Wall Street activist Michael Premo has brought us a close-quarters look at the chaos surrounding the prior one in 2020, which culminated in the 6 January assault on Washington DC’s Capitol building. Visceral and watchable, if blunt, Homegrown is premiering in the Venice International Film Critics’ Week as the sole non-fiction feature in its competition line-up, with its embedded, climactic footage of the Capitol assault fully convincing as “cinema”, standing alongside other spectacular imagery in the fiction films on offer here.

But Homegrown’s flaw isn’t to risk providing a further platform to the far-right or being a guilty apology for not taking an obvious threat seriously. It’s that Premo’s vivid present-tense perspective forecloses analysis and reflection a little, accompanying two variously dangerous protagonists as they contemplate a would-be armed struggle taking their America back. Their selection as partial contrasts by Premo is telling: Thad, deceptively appearing to be the film’s primary interest, is a Proud Boy and a self-described “conspiracy theorist”, a young, non-conformist man of Hispanic origin from Texas, with allies in the white-supremacist fold as well as – surprisingly – Black Lives Matter. Chris, a married electrician from New Brunswick, New Jersey, feels more unaffiliated and less ideological, yet Premo tracks him from a friendly-ish “hello” in his new living room to arming up with an AR-15 and a bulletproof vest as he sets off to storm the Capitol as encouraged by Donald Trump, who wouldn’t concede the result that ended his first term as president.

With this era of US history recalling the late 1960s, which also saw major cities collapsing into civil unrest, it’s apt that Homegrown has the verité approach popularised at that time – the “direct” mode seeing public life and strife as inherently cinematic. And if we don’t leave the film more enlightened than the past eight years (and their political echoes in Europe) have made us, Premo expertly guides our emotions as Chris becomes the focal point, where we hear and pity his grievances and alienation, and then witness him betraying his own dignity and that of his family: his wife, who happens to be of East Asian descent, and their unborn child on the way.

Moving back to Thad, Premo is also at pains to, at times unconvincingly, distinguish the Proud Boys from the more elaborate QAnon conspiracy as well as card-carrying forms of white supremacy: in his words, he’s a “Western Chauvinist”, not a white supremacist, and a “street fighter”, rather than a militia member. “Communism”, even if that’s referring to something like single-payer healthcare, is the enemy, personified on the battlefields of their new civil war by Antifa. It’s the same old tiresome nonsense, but you feel the director sympathising in how both sides concur that the Democratic Party’s centrism is just a bandage for the country, and not the cure.

Premo also captures the fact that these men, hypnotised by YouTube recommendations and private chat servers, are fundamentally lonely and grasping for connection; his shots shy away from other people and busy public places, where their own myopia can be tarnished. He prefers wide lenses isolating these men in the frame, and a wide aspect ratio, showing the endless highways and deserted suburban streets, landscapes of nothingness that hatch the homegrown threats they are.

Homegrown is a US production, staged by Storyline. Its international sales are handled by MetFilm Sales.