Vigilante: Vote Suppression Hitmen, which will premiere in 2024, won the New Media Film Festival Award for Best Documentary Trailer. The 14th annual event, which brought together the work of established and emerging creators from 22 nations, was held in Los Angeles on June 7 and 8, 2023.
The original version of the film, Vigilante: Georgia’s Vote Suppression Hitman, directed by David Ambrose, was previewed in Hollywood in October 2022 at an event hosted by Jamie Foxx and sponsored by the ACLU. The film was also screened in Georgia ahead of the 2022 midterm elections at a series of special voter impact events sponsored by Black Voters Matter Fund, NAACP Georgia, RainbowPUSH, and other rights groups in a highly successful campaign to protect the rights of nearly a quarter million voters of color who were challenged by Republican officials, self-proclaimed election “vigilantes.”
Activists were able to use the evidence uncovered by Palast and his team to challenge these mass vote challenges and save the rights of nearly all those voters at risk. This prompted Atlanta’s WRFG radio station to say Sen. Raphael Warnock’s victory in the pivotal battleground 2022 Georgia Senate race “would not have happened without the work of Greg Palast.”
The film’s writer, investigative reporter Palast, said, “We work to let the voters, not voter suppression trickery, choose the winners.”
The new, nationwide version of Vigilante, to be released ahead of the 2024 presidential election, will explore how the vote suppression tactics first used in Georgia have spread across the United States. Indeed, Palast and his crew are currently filming in Texas, where the prison-bound Attorney General, Ken Paxton, gloated on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast (first broadcast in Friday, May 26, 2023) that Trump would have lost the state in 2020 but for the fact he blocked 2.5 million mail-in ballots.
Greg Palast with Juanita Chavez, daughter of rights legends Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta at the New Media Film Festival.
Palast, who spoke briefly at the film fest, told the audience that the film is extraordinarily, funded by hundreds of tax-deductible donations by supporters of the Palast Investigations Fund, a non-partisan, not-for-profit foundation project that for two decades has supported deep investigative reporting into racist voting schemes and corporate crime shenanigans.
Vigilante is produced by Academy Award winner Maria Florio and directed by David Ambrose. The film is narrated by Rosario Dawson, and introduced by Martin Sheen, who also served as an executive producer alongside George DiCaprio and Stephen Nemeth.
Writer, editor, photographer, videographer, social media consultant, and tactivist (tactical activist), Nicole Powers uses art and technology to share ideas that make the world a better place.
