מויניהאן

MOYNIHAN is an immersive portrait of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the ground-breaking intellectual, policy specialist, ambassador and long serving New York senator. Fifteen years after his death, a feature length documentary about his life captures Moynihan as never before.

A legendary quipster, Moynihan is today known most widely for his adage, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” frequently quoted in this age of fake news. But he was also the author of the landmark “Moynihan Report” on the problem of African American poverty in the inner cities and one of the first to draw attention to the problem of chronic unemployment in the black community at a time of general prosperity. Even at the height of the battle for basic civil rights in the mid-1960s, Moynihan prophesied that liberty without equality would breed generations of unrest. He went on to become one of the architects of President Johnson’s War on Poverty.

Over the years, Moynihan’s work has frequently been misinterpreted by writers and politicians. He was lauded by the right for his belief in the limits of governmental action. And yet, he remained a staunch champion of federal government intervention to alleviate persistent poverty in the African American inner city that he believed to be the result of endemic racism. By clarifying Moynihan’s thought and offering it to a new generation, for whom he is largely unknown, the film promises to revive the debate over the very same issues that he first began tackling over a half century ago.

The film places Moynihan’s life and ideas within the context of key historical events and intellectual debates that raged in his day, including the struggle for civil rights; the Wars on Poverty and in Vietnam; the urban riots of the 1960s; the evolution of welfare policy; the rise of neoconservatism; and the fall of the Soviet Union. Extensive archival footage and interviews with old friends and family members, as well as colleagues and pundits on both sides of the aisle from Henry Kissinger to Senator Chuck Schumer, George Will to Ta-Nehisi Coates flesh out a portrait of a visionary thinker and a consummate public servant.

As the nation sinks into hyper-partisanship and politics devolves into the frenzy of social media, the first feature length documentary about Moynihan’s life captures the spirit and substance of the man — and of a time when democratic norms and political discourse mattered.

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