Henry Fonda for President Trailer Charts America’s History Through a Legendary Career

One of the most thought-provoking, densely assembled documentaries of the year is just a week away from release. Alexandar Horwath’s Henry Fonda for President, which premiered at Berlinale last year, is a three-hour journey through the career of the legendary actor but rather than a standard cradle-to-grave story, the director uses his performances and life […] The post Henry Fonda for President Trailer Charts America’s History Through a Legendary Career first appeared on The Film Stage.

Mar 27, 2025 - 02:09

Henry Fonda for President Trailer Charts America’s History Through a Legendary Career

One of the most thought-provoking, densely assembled documentaries of the year is just a week away from release. Alexandar Horwath’s Henry Fonda for President, which premiered at Berlinale last year, is a three-hour journey through the career of the legendary actor but rather than a standard cradle-to-grave story, the director uses his performances and life events to chart a course of the history of America itself. Also featuring audio from Fonda’s final interview, it’s a truly fascinating approach to rethinking the biographical documentary, and now the Film Desk will give its U.S. theatrical premiere run starting at Anthology Film Archives on April 3. Ahead of the release, the new trailer has now arrived.

Here’s the synopsis: “The feature film debut by Austrian film scholar, historian, and curator Alexander Horwath – the former Director of the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum – HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT represents, as its title suggests, a filmic portrait of the actor Henry Fonda, but it is anything but a conventional Hollywood portrait. While it is structured chronologically according to the progression of Fonda’s life and career, the film transcends individual portraiture by using Fonda as a prism through which it explores and meditates upon the changing (and intimately intertwined) politics, society, and culture of the United States in Fonda’s time. Equally adept at cultural criticism, historical accounting, and political analysis, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT also incorporates elements of found-footage filmmaking and landscape cinema, as it combines a wide array of revelatory archival material (including film and television clips, Fonda’s final 1981 interview, news reports, and more) with Horwath’s own footage of sites throughout the U.S. Extending the tradition of seminal reflections on America by commentators from abroad, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT achieves the near-impossible, articulating a genuinely new and profoundly insightful take on 1900s-80s American culture, and on the legacy of this era both on the wider world and on the present day.”

See the trailer below and return for our review and interview with the director.

The post Henry Fonda for President Trailer Charts America’s History Through a Legendary Career first appeared on The Film Stage.