INSPIRED BY TRUE EVENTS – a Director’s Blog
“I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.”
Lewis Carroll – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Government human experimentation. Those three words leave an acrid, metallic taste in my mouth. Yet I am inexplicably drawn to them and have spent over a decade in the rabbit hole of the secret and depraved world of government-sponsored human experimentation and exploitation.
The revelations outlined in the United States General Accounting Office report GAO/T-NSIAD-94-266 published on September 28, 1994 are chilling. According to the report (the following is paraphrased but accurate), “During World War II and the Cold War era, [the United States Department of Defense] DOD and other national security agencies conducted or sponsored extensive radiological, chemical, and biological research programs. Precise information on the number of tests, experiments, and participants is not available, and the exact numbers may never be known. However, hundreds of radiological, chemical, and biological tests and experiments have been identified in which hundreds of thousands of people were used as test subjects.” Involving hazardous substances, biological agents, and harmful, illicit drugs, these clandestine experiments were conducted on people without their knowledge or consent.
More recent reports claim that hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on the US government’s efforts to create the ultimate soldier – devoid of guilt, pain, and fatigue through use of chemical, biological and psychological manipulation. These motives and methods aren’t new phenomena…similar unethical and horrific warfare methods echo tactics used by ancient Greece and the British Empire.
Together with the declassification and exposure of targeted mind control and abuse programs such as MK-ULTRA, BLUEBIRD and Project Monarch, the evidence suggests a long and sordid history of exploitation of unsuspecting individuals to manipulate the biological system for nefarious government objectives.
My latest short film “Our Own” was influenced by these inconceivable truths. My research has taken me to some very dark places, and I have uncovered the implausible, the gruesome, the corrupt. But like Alice, I’ve gone willingly into that rabbit hole…
“In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.”
Lewis Carroll – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
I am a different person now knowing these facts, and there is no turning back. These secrets, these horrors, this conspiracy, have seeded more stories for me to tell…“Our Own” is just the beginning.
Follow me down the rabbit hole.
Kim Bergman
Writer/Director/Executive Producer
OUR OWN
As a result of post-World War 2 paranoia, government intelligence agencies initiated a complex, highly classified scientific effort to develop the ultimate human weapon in the name of defense. Research facilities were established in remote locations across the country and housed the investigative efforts of some of the worlds’ foremost scientists, specializing in biologic, genetic, and psychological manipulation. Despite official cessation of these behavioral modification studies in the early 1970s and destruction of classified documentation of such experiments, research continued well into present day in one small, seemingly peaceful Midwestern town. Through the years, the town has existed under the shadow of these unethical, underground experimentations and its families have suffered the program’s gruesome “failures”. Yet this secret remained hidden from the outside world…until now.
Our Own is the story of this town and the lives of the people unfortunate enough to be born and to die there. When a soldier escapes the local military base, there is a massive manhunt. But before he’s contained, he leaves behind evidence that infects a local family. The devastating consequence turns the family’s world upside down and forces them to protect their own.
Our Own Trailer
KIM BERGMAN 