Homegrown is a documentary about three American patriots who love their country, revere Donald Trump and balk at the result of the 2020 presidential election. Director Michael Premo spent months trailing his subjects – Chris, Thad and Randy – in the run-up to the attack on the Capitol building of 6 January 2021, and his illuminating, gripping film looks back at a dark period of recent US history. Implicitly, though, it also warns of further unrest.
“I think January 6th was just the warm-up,” Premo says. “This November, we’re going to see an even more frantic and desperate attempt to attack every level of the electoral system.” He is not optimistic about the US’s current direction of travel. The country, he argues, is effectively on the brink of civil war.
Homegrown premieres at this year’s Venice film festival. It is one of a number of campaigning political pictures that could put the event at loggerheads with Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right Italian government. Joining it on the programme is Separated, Errol Morris’s documentary about family separation on the US’s southern border; Dani Rosenberg’s harrowing Gaza-themed drama Of Dogs and Men; and Olha Zhurba’s Songs of Slow Burning Earth, which is billed as an audiovisual diary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Another highlight, says festival boss Alberto Barbera, will be the epic M: Son of the Century, Joe Wright’s eight-part TV biopic charting the life and times of Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, whose government established the Venice film festival back in 1932. “And I must add,” Barbera told Variety magazine, “the time it describes has some pretty striking similarities with the present day.”
Links with the past are certainly clear in Homegrown, which spotlights a right-wing insurrectionist movement that had flourished on the fringes for decades before finding a new energy and focus under the Maga banner of Trump. Premo, a New York-based film-maker, began researching the documentary in 2018, eventually homing in on his three main protesters. One, Chris Quaglin, is a New Jersey electrician who divides his time between preparing a nursery for his soon-to-be-born son and stocking his “man-cave” with firearms in readiness for war. He says: “An AR-15 and enough people is enough to take our country back.”
This, Premo argues, remains a distinct possibility. “Most prominent thinkers still dismiss the idea of civil war, because their reference is an event that occurred in 1860 under a very specific set of circumstances. But that’s discounting the way that modern political violence manifests itself, and particularly the way that sectarian violence plays out around the world. If this was happening in another country, say in Africa or Asia, I think American journalists would already be referring to the situation as a cold civil war. That’s how it feels to me.”
Homegrown climaxes with powerful, ground-level footage of the January 6 attack. We see Quaglin in the thick of the action, resplendent in his stars-and-stripes Maga jumpsuit. He is swept up in the moment, storming the DC police by the metal barricades. “Almost a victory, I would say,” he brags afterwards, although this moment of near triumph proves short-lived. Quaglin was later found guilty of assaulting police and obstructing Congress and is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence.
Premo has spent his career filming direct action protests. January 6 felt different, he says. “This was one of the most well-documented crimes in history. It was planned in public: a collaborative conspiracy involving numerous actors and institutions. Everyone knew it was coming.”
The director says he anticipated a massive police presence which would prevent protesters from gaining access to the Capitol. In the event, he was shocked by the lack of security; he says it almost felt deliberate. “I have to imagine that there are many law enforcement people who are part of these same conservative Facebook groups. They’re watching Fox News, watching Alex Jones and all the other pundits bang the drum about storming the Capitol. They had the same information I did and chose to do nothing about it.”
What Homegrown highlights, however, is how broad-based and diverse America’s right-wing populist movement has become. Premo, who is black, claims that its main organising principle is not race hatred so much as despair and disillusion, characterised by a widespread loss of faith in American democracy’s ability to safeguard public interests. Significantly, the film chooses to cross-cut Quaglin’s journey with that of his fellow rebel Thad Cisneros, a charismatic Latino activist from Texas. Cisneros explains that he was first radicalised by watching Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. He now dreams of forming an alliance with Black Lives Matter organisers.
Cisneros, it transpires, is now also serving time and thus unavailable for comment. But he represents an increasingly fractured and muddied political landscape, one in which the old left-and-right stereotypes no longer apply. “We need to have a more nuanced understanding of the people driving this movement,” Premo says. “We need to know who these people are, what they look like, where they come from. Only then can we understand what we need to do to support the principle of a pluralistic democracy that stands any chance of surviving beyond this current era of us-versus-them politics.”