Politics & Power Quote by Ben Edwards

Film wants to be art, but it’s also a press release with better lighting. Ben Edwards’ line cuts to the uncomfortable truth that movies rarely arrive ideologically “neutral,” because cinema is built from choices that are already political: whose pain matters, whose heroism is legible, what counts as justice, what gets framed as “just the way things are.” Even the attempt to avoid politics often becomes a politics of avoidance, a quiet endorsement of the status quo.

The phrasing “especially where the subject is close to the film makers hart” (misspelling and all) is doing real work: it locates partisanship not just in money or propaganda, but in intimacy. When a story touches a filmmaker’s identity, community, trauma, or moral fixation, the film stops being an argument and becomes a defense mechanism. That’s why these projects so often feel inevitable to their creators and manipulative to their critics: they’re not simply trying to persuade; they’re trying to be understood.

Calling partisan filmmaking “the norm” also punctures a common industry myth: that bias is an aberration reserved for overtly ideological docs or election-season thrillers. Edwards is pointing at something broader - the way prestige dramas, biopics, war films, and “based on a true story” narratives regularly launder viewpoint into “objectivity” through production value and solemn tone.

The subtext is less a complaint than a shrugging diagnosis: if film is political by nature, the honest question isn’t whether a movie has an agenda. It’s whether it admits it, and whether it earns it.