'January 6 was just the warm-up': the film that tracks three Maga extremists storming the Capitol

Michael Premo spent months getting to know, and filming, three Maga insurrectionists who took part in the riots. Why does the documentary-maker now think America is tottering on the brink of civil war?

Xan Brooks
Tue 27 Aug 2024 10.35 EDT

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.

With an AR-15 and enough people, says Chris, we can take our country back
Homegrown premieres in the International Critics’ Week sidebar 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 rightwing 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.

. . .

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.”

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/aug/27/january-6-maga-extremists-storming-capitol-homegrown

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https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/aug/27/january-6-maga-extremists-storming-capitol-homegrown