Directed by Phillip Gara
An investigation into how war games, worst-case scenarios, complex systems, and networked media produce the very crises they seek to model, predict and report.
As the Cold War ends, a professor goes in search of an America without an enemy. Armed with a Hi8 video camera and inspired by the detective work of Walter Benjamin, he heads deep into the inner circles of the defense, entertainment and media industries, where he discovers a worst-case future being built from war games, video games, and language games.
Some thirty years later, a group of student filmmakers find the videotapes in a filing cabinet, along with a stack of old newspaper clippings, audio interviews and photographs. With the help of friends from the Global Media Project, the filmmaker produces an experimental documentary that goes back to the future, where they find the original maps for a new world order. An unexpected warning is found on the outermost edges of the maps: "Beware of Zombies!"
The result is PROJECT Z, a film that updates another warning, issued by President Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address, about the emergence of a "military-industrial complex" and the consequences should "public policy be captured by a scientific and technological elite".
Combining rare footage from inside the war machine with corrosive commentary by leading critics of global violence, injustice, and inequality, the film challenges the living to write their own future before the walking dead conjure the final global event.
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