MONTREAL — The Sean Penn-narrated documentary War Made Easy, a scathing indictment of five decades of U.S. media coverage of American-led military interventions, is set to make its international premiere this weekend at the 2007 Montreal World Film Festival.

The film, released worldwide by the Canadian-based Mundovision, is inspired by the work of American author and media critic Norman Solomon, who traveled with Penn to Baghdad just before the U.S. invasion to call attention to the potential human costs of going to war with Iraq.

The film is already creating buzz in the United States. It has earned advanced praise from Variety as a "damning" and "unobtrusively well-crafted film", and was described in a front-page feature in the San Francisco Chronicle as "a searing critique of how administrations over the past 40 years have manipulated the media to build support for war."

Based on Solomon’s acclaimed book of the same title, War Made Easy ranges across the American media landscape from the close of World War II to the ongoing war in Iraq. It exhumes remarkable archival footage to make the case that American presidents of both parties have relied upon deceptive rhetoric and a complicit Washington press corps to win public support for successive wars. In some of its most powerful sequences, the film gives special attention to striking parallels between the selling of the Vietnam War and the selling of the war in Iraq.

According to Solomon, the film¹s international premiere at the 31st World Film Festival could help counter this long history of spin and deception.

"These deep patterns of ongoing ‘perception management’ must be demystified and decoded if we're going to move beyond the horrors of perpetual war," Solomon said. "And the debut of War Made Easy on the world film stage in Montreal could be an important step in that direction."w

War Made Easy was written and directed in the United States by Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp of the Media Education Foundation, the Massachusetts-based production team whose critically-acclaimed 2004 documentary Hijacking Catastrophe examined how a neo-conservative worldview propelled the Bush administration¹s drive to war in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.

The film will premiere on Saturday, August 25 at 19:20 at the Quartier Latin cinema complex (theatre L16) with further screenings on Sunday, August 26 (at 18:10), as well as on Monday and Tuesday, August 27 and 28, at 11:30 a.m. and 15:30 respectively at the same venue. Solomon will be at the premiere and the two subsequent screenings to take questions.