“The Neutral Ground,” a 2021 documentary that examines the country’s relationship to Confederacy and race through the removal of Confederate monuments in New Orleans, taking an investigative approach from the lens of racial history in America.
In Thursday’s edition of “Closer Look,” CJ Hunt, the film’s director and screenwriter, discusses the making of the documentary and his commentary on race.
Since its release, the film has been banned from classrooms in at least 17 states, as well as receiving an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Historical Documentary as part of its “POV” performance on PBS.
“The Neutral Ground” includes interviews and news footage dating back to 2015, sometimes taking a personal approach through the inclusion of personal anecdotes from filmmaker CJ Hunt’s upbringing.
By discussing topics such as the denial of slavery’s involvement in the Civil War, the documentary highlights the sanitation of history and the danger of its translation into the classroom.
“Sometimes a lie can be hardened into a statue, and sometimes a lie can be hardened into a law. It can sometimes be repeated in a textbook — that this war wasn’t about slavery and slavery wasn’t that bad,” Hunt said. “I think it gets students developing into a right place where they [realize], ‘We can dig up the truth about the past. Democracy demands that we go back and dig up some things a politician hopes we’ve forgotten.’”
