Toronto: The assassination of US President George W Bush is laid out in chilling detail in Death of a President, a fictional movie told in documentary style that premiered on Sunday night at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Airing next month on British television, the movie chronicles the sniper shooting of Bush on October 19, 2007, during a trip to Chicago for a speech on the economy.
It includes interviews with actors playing Secret Service and FBI officials, White House aides, journalists and anti-war activists, along with suspects and their relatives.
The film plays out like a whodunit on a grand scale, tracing the twists and turns of the investigation against the backdrop of the continuing Iraq war, an expansion of the Patriot Act anti-terrorism laws to give federal authorities greater powers of surveillance, and other fallout from the September 11 attacks.
"It is using the lens of the future to look at the present," director Gabriel Range told the audience after the premiere. "It is about issues that have affected us all in the last five years. It is a film about America today."
The digital offshoot of Britain's Channel 4 network plans to show the programme on October 9.
The filmmakers were at the Toronto festival looking for US distributors.
Death of a President blends archival footage of Bush interspersed with fierce anti-war protests and other fictional scenes crafted by the filmmakers.
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