Documentary filmmaker Matthew Rankin says he can’t make a film about someone he doesn’t like, and his latest subject is late prime minister Brian Mulroney. “You do see Brian Mulroney in the film being somewhat duplicitous, somewhat brutal, but that is politics, right? Politics is a bloodsport a lot of times. But, at the same time, you do see that he is an absolute political genius,” Rankin told CTV News. Rankin’s offbeat Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney will screen at the Globe Cinema on Tuesday, Nov. 18, as part of the CUFF.Docs Documentary Film Festival, and Rankin will be here for a Q-and-A with the audience. “It’s kind of a culture jam. It’s not really a journalistic film. It is kind of playing with Canadian pop culture and television of that era,” Rankin said. The feature-length documentary mashes together quirky animated sequences and archival footage to tell the story of Mulroney’s quest to win the Progressive Conservative party leadership—a goal he achieved with a second run for the leadership in 1983. “It really was an enormous, herculean undertaking. I think there’s something close to 80,000 individual pieces of film and video and photography in my hard drive that I was working from.”
