NEW YORK (AP) – Perplexed by America’s controversial relationship with Confederate monuments, “The Daily Show” team member CJ Hunt saw potential for what he thought would make an interesting short film.
But not long after beginning the project, he realized a much bigger story was revealing itself and it became “The Neutral Ground,” a feature-length documentary that premiered Saturday at the Tribeca Film Festival and will available July 5 on PBS.
The serious, yet funny, documentary examines the Lost Cause, the campaign that mythicized the Confederacy after the Civil War and continues the narrative that the conflict was more about freedom than the right to own slaves.
“You can’t name another war where the losers get thousands of monuments,” Hunt recently told The Associated Press in an interview promoting the film.
Hunt said Southern secession documents clearly put slavery first as the reason for the division. But after the Civil War, the film points out that a successful propaganda campaign shifted the cause from being about owning people as property to state’s rights and patriotism.