Allen v. Farrow should be considered "activism" and "pure PR"

The Guardian

The Guardian's Hadley Freeman, who got to interview Woody Allen last year, calls the HBO documentary "as biased and partial as a political candidate’s advert vilifying an opponent in election season." She adds: "In Allen v Farrow, directors Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick play on two strong currents in today’s popular culture: first, the enormous appetite for true crime documentaries, and second, a re-evaluation of past wrongs, looking back at a distant time when people were insufficiently evolved to understand social justice. These two elements struggle to work together because unless a true crime documentary has a smoking gun – such as Robert Durst’s confession in The Jinx – the appeal of the genre lies in its ambiguity, allowing the audience to play detective, such as with the podcast Serial, or Netflix’s Making a Murderer. In this regard, the Allen case is actually a perfect subject for a true crime documentary, given that the case has always had multiple – to put it mildly – ambiguities, many of which have now been forgotten. But Ziering and Dick don’t seem to have any interest in that, because their focus is on social justice. They have been criticized in the past for 'putting advocacy ahead of accuracy' in their 2015 documentary about campus rape, Hunting Ground, which used discredited data...Dick has described himself in the past as 'an activist and a filmmaker,' and activism can be the opposite of journalism, because rather than asking questions to find the truth, the conclusion looks pre-ordained from the start, with inconvenient facts getting pushed aside – and there are many inconvenient facts when it comes to Allen." Freeman sent Ziering and Dick a list of Allen v. Farrow's omissions. In response, the directors released the following statement: "The filmmakers behind Allen v .Farrow meticulously examined tens of thousands of pages of documents, including court transcripts, police reports, eyewitness testimonies and child welfare records. We spoke with dozens of persons involved with the case who had first-hand knowledge of the events and whose accounts could be independently corroborated. Allen v. Farrow is a complete, thorough and accurate presentation of the facts." ALSO: Dick and Ziering fire back at Alec Baldwin for calling Allen v. Farrow a "trial by media," especially since "he hasn’t seen the whole thing yet."