In 1941, when Citizen Kane came out, Orson Welles was 25 years old. At an age when others are making their often sloppy debuts, he delivered one of the four or five best films in film history in his debut. The brilliance of the American filmmaker—and screenwriter, actor, and producer—is exhaustively analyzed, but less frequently mentioned is how “undesirable” he was for several years in his homeland, which led to his self-exile from late 1947 to 1956 in Europe. We see what happened before he made that decision in Danny Wu’s documentary An American: An Odyssey to 1947, which premiered today at the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival.

However, it all starts with “Citizen Kane” or “The American”, as was the first title of the legendary film. Wells had an early eye for the American businessman and media mogul William Randolph Hearst, who made no secret of his admiration for Hitler as he promoted a deeply conservative-racist agenda before the outbreak of World War II. When screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz entered the game in 1940, Hearst’s character Charles Foster Kane became flesh and blood. The film was already ready, but this did not mean that it would be released without problems. Even before the premiere, other companies, including MGM, were ready to buy “Citizen Kane” from the producer RKO in order to … burn it. Even when it finally received a limited release (due to underground pressure), it underperformed at the box office, though many who saw it called it a masterpiece.

But this was only the beginning of hostilities. In Wu’s documentary, we watch J. Edgar Hoover under the microscope. He intervenes in the midst of a war with a lesser-known filmmaker’s mission to Brazil, ostensibly to make a film about the Rio carnival, but in reality to bolster pro-American sentiment in a populous society. Latin American country. Wells, for his part, turned the film into a humanist-anti-racist message, filming without the stereotype of blacks and whites during the events. Under the laws of the American South, Jim Crow, the film was banned.

“I wanted my film to not only reflect Wells’ career, but also illuminate the social background of the time and somehow connect it to the inspiration behind his own projects.”

All in all, the second part of the documentary, complete with well-done 3D animation that fills in pictorial gaps, deals with the racism that Orson Welles fought viciously throughout the 1940s. hero, while the rest of society remains on the sidelines. I wanted my film not only to reflect Wells’ career, but also to illuminate the social background of the time and somehow connect it to the inspiration behind his own projects,” notes Danny Wu. In the course of his research, the latter discovered that one of the main reasons why Wells became the target of the FBI and was eventually forced to leave America was his unwavering support, mainly through his radio broadcasts, of the case of Isaac Woodard, an African American veteran. was severely beaten and blinded by police officers in South Carolina in 1946.

Woodard’s story is detailed here through stories from his nephew and niece who give touching interviews. However, prejudice in the United States of the 1940s was directed not only against blacks. After the destruction of Pearl Harbor and the country’s entry into the war, Asian Americans, whether Japanese or not, were often targeted. People were beaten, shops were destroyed, racist slogans were written on the walls. The hostility forced the then-young Howard Kakita’s parents—third-generation immigrants—to send him and his sister back to Japan. Their grandmother’s house in Hiroshima was in the ring of the atomic bomb dropped in 1945, he miraculously survived. Seventy-five years later, he tells Wu’s camera about his experience, as well as his return to America in 1947, when Orson Welles left it.

“When Orson Welles leaves for the airport, I can imagine the alienation he feels having to leave America, the country he loves. It’s the same feeling as Howard Kakita, who is due to return to America shortly after his home in Japan is bombed. How does Isaac Woodard feel living in a country where the court found the man who blinded him innocent, ”concludes Danny Wu.