Bulletproof Salesman

Director: Michael Tucker & Petra Epperlein
Runtime: 70 minutes
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screening in: Documentary Competition

Screening Times

6:30 PM, Saturday March 8th - Austin Convention Ctr
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6:30 PM, Monday March 10th - Austin Convention Ctr
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7:15 PM, Thursday March 13th - Austin Convention Ctr
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everything subject to change

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Synopsis:
Fidelis Cloer is a self-confessed war profiteer. In a career spanning two decades of global turmoil, he has supplied kings, presidents and the odd dictator or two with the finest luxury armored vehicles that money can buy. In his world, security is a commodity that can be bought and sold and violence is to sales as the weather is to wheat futures. Always with an on eye on growth opportunities, Fidelis found The Perfect War when the US invaded Iraq: it wasn't about selling a dozen cars, or even a hundred, it was a thousand car war where security would become the ultimate product. Driving into Baghdad after it fell to American troops, he remarked, "This is the end of the beginning of the war," and so began his darkly comedic drive down the road to opportunity. Before the war, when clients were concerned with bullets and not bombs, his sales mantra was "I sell a good feeling": a sense of safety, security and confidence in superior German engineering that came across like a VW commercial gone wrong. But come 2004, and the threat of armor shredding Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), survivability became his sales pitch and he quickly found himself engaged in a pathological arms race with the insurgents who upped their explosive ante to defeat his increasingly higher (and more expensive) levels of armor. In war, like life, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Director's Bio:
Michael Tucker was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1966 and worked for two years as a commercial fisherman in Alaska until an accident on a factory trawler led him to pick up his first camera.

Petra Epperlein was born in Karl Marx Stadt, GDR in 1966. After two years of work as a bricklayer, Epperlein studied architecture in Dresden where after receiving her diploma in 1991, she headed west to America.