At Sundance, a new documentary will paint a damaging portrait of Steve Bannon -- with his help

[brooklynite]

Washington Post

Directed by Alison Klayman, “The Brink,” which Bannon cooperated with, is a rare fly-on-the-wall look at its subject. It offers the specter of an unguarded zealot, a firebrand with his sleeves rolled up. When it makes its first-ever public screening on Wednesday at the Utah festival, followed by a commercial release from “RBG” distributor Magnolia Pictures in March, it will cast new light on one of the most polarizing figures in modern politics.

And while that light is thrown on a figure more charming and self-deprecating than his sometimes Voldemortian public image, “The Brink,” which The Washington Post was shown before the festival, doesn’t lack for provocative moments.

In the back seat of a black car while traveling in London, Bannon is told by a British staffer that a formerly Christian-heavy street has become populated with Arab stores. “When did it flip?” he replies.

Meanwhile, near the film’s beginning, he can be seen doing nothing less than assessing the engineering feats of Holocaust death camps. Birkenau, he says, was far more impressive than Auschwitz, because it was built from the ground up, as opposed to Auschwitz, which was a requisitioned Polish cavalry college. “Precision engineering to the nth degree, by Mercedes, Krupp, Hugo Boss,” he says, while recounting to the camera a visit he took to the camp to shoot the 2016 Phil Robertson documentary “Torchbearer.”