The Sean Penn-narrated documentary War Made Easy, a scathing indictment of five decades of U.S. media coverage of American-led military interventions, will have its local premiere at a special benefit screening at the Academy of Music on Sept. 28.

The film was produced locally by the Media Education Foundation (MEF) in Northampton, and has been earning widespread critical praise since its official selection by the Montreal World Film Festival and its U.S. premiere at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco in August.

Written and directed by MEF’s Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp, War Made Easy is based on the work of media critic and author Norman Solomon, who traveled with Penn to Baghdad just before the war to call attention to the dangers of a US invasion. It exhumes remarkable archival footage to make the case that American presidents of both parties have relied upon deceptive rhetoric and a complicit Washington press corps to win public support for successive wars. In some of its most powerful sequences, the film presents striking parallels between the selling of the Vietnam War and the selling of the war in Iraq.

In a four-star review, the Montreal Gazette observed that “if Penn's voice sounds somewhat hushed narrating this searing doc, it's because he, like most others who will catch it, is probably blown away by the compelling case brought to the surface and captured so effectively on screen.”

And U.S. critics have concurred. Variety called War Made Easy a “damning” and “unobtrusively well-crafted film.” The Nation magazine described it as “chilling and persuasive.” And the San Francisco Chronicle praised it as “a genuine eye-opener and a treat for history buffs,” an “expertly edited and researched” documentary that offers "a searing critique of how administrations over the past 40 years have manipulated the media to build support for war."

While the film is now playing nationwide in select independent theaters, it has also become something of a grassroots phenomenon through Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Theaters network, a new web-based distribution system that has allowed ordinary citizens across the country to arrange hundreds of screenings of the film in their own communities.

According to Solomon, the fact that the film has been gaining such positive attention can only help to counter what has been a long history of pro-war media spin and government deception. “These deep patterns of ongoing 'perception management' must be demystified and decoded if we're going to move beyond the horrors of perpetual war,” Solomon said. “The way War Made Easy is being embraced could be an important step in that direction."

Solomon will be in attendance to discuss the film after its local premiere at the Academy. The event will begin at 7:30, and is open to the public.

****To purchase tickets, please visit www.tix.com or www.academyofmusictheatre.com****

HOSTED BY: Progressive Democrats of America, FREE PRESS, American Friends Service Committee, Media Education Foundation, the Northampton Committee to End the War in Iraq, National Priorities Project, and the University of Massachusetts Communication Department.