It is not the same as the book of the same name. The Director is Black. It should come out on DVD or VHS in Fall 2004. There are pics on the website of Lance Armstrong on the moon with a Confederate Flag in the background and a different pic has 3 men wearing shirts that say CBI(Confederate Bureau of Investigation)
www.csathemovie.com
Confederate States of America (2004)
Starring: Evamarii Johnson, Jon Niccum
Director: Kevin Willmott
Synopsis: Satirical mockumentary about slavery in America that shows what could have happened if the South had won the Civil War.
Runtime: 91 minutes
MPAA Rating:
Genres: Comedy, Drama, Indie
Confederate States of America (2004)What fate would have befallen the United States had the South won the Civil War? That is the provocative question writer/director Kevin Wilmott attempts to answer in his brilliantly conceived faux documentary, CSA: Confederate States of America. While at 91 minutes that include an incendiary collection of phony commercials, this deadly serious satire continues long after it's made its point, there is no denying its power to provoke thought and, hopefully, a dialogue among the races in this country that is long overdue.
Modeled after a Ken Burns-style documentary, Wilmott presents his fictional doc as a British product making its controversial TV debut in the Confederate State of America. This is a country where the Gray side proved triumphant, where the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln, instead of dying by an assassin's bullet at Ford's Theater, fled in surrender to Canada. Slavery is so enshrined that slaves are bought and sold over the Internet, the country sided with Hitler during World War II, and there's an ongoing cold war with Canada, the country to which escaping slaves and abolitionists have traditionally fled. CSA's power extends to Central and South America where a system of apartheid separates the white, North American ruling class from the region's indigenous population. And in the 21st century, CSA's women still don't have the right to vote.
Wilmott leaves nothing out of his perfectly realized re-creation of this alternate history. As talking-head historians explain the events of the past 140 years, there are archival photos, old newspaper accounts and editorial cartoons, and dramatized scenes. There are clips from a fiction D.W. Griffith movie, The Hunt for Dishonest Abe and '50s-era sitcom, Leave It to Beulah. Interspersed throughout are ads for such products as Darkie toothpaste, Coon Chicken Inn and others, most of which were at one time actual products sold in the United States.
At a time when so many people still defend the Confederate flag and insist on putting the Civil War in terms of "states' rights," CSA explicates the full implications of those positions. In satirizing history, Wilmott lays down a gauntlet, indicting ingrained attitudes and prejudices, and daring us all to do something about it.