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Hear from artist, Andrea Luka Zimmerman in conversation with Andrew Hoskins, Interdisciplinary Research Professor in Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow. The conversation covers themes and ideas surrounding Zimmerman’s film Erase and Forget, (2017) and was recorded at Filmhouse Edinburgh on 13 May.

Erase and Forget is a major new investigative documentary that explores and exposes the decades of militarism, gun culture, toxic masculinity and social unrest that led to the age of Trump.

The film explores ‘the deep bonds between Hollywood’s fictionalized conflicts and America’s hidden wars’ through a complex portrayal of controversial US soldier, whistle-blower and ex-presidential candidate Bo Gritz.

One of America’s highest decorated veterans, the ‘inspiration’ behind Rambo, Colonel John ‘Hannibal’ Smith (The A-Team) and Brando’s Colonel Kurtz (Apocalypse Now), Gritz was at the heart of American military and foreign policy – both overt and covert – from the Bay of Pigs to Afghanistan, before turning whistle-blower and launching anti-government training programmes.

Deploying confessional and exploratory interviews, news and cultural footage, creative re-enactment and previously unseen archive material, the film proposes a multi-layered investigation of war as a social structure, a way of being for individuals and countries in what is becoming an era of ‘permanent conflict’.