Film and television In 2000, Jarecki’s first feature documentary film,
Quest of the Carib Canoe was distributed by
BBC Two. It documents an effort by indigenous
Carib Indians on the Island of
Dominica to build an ancient ocean-going canoe and retrace their ancestors' path from South America's
Orinoco Delta in what is now modern
Guyana to the islands of the Caribbean. His second film that year was a dramatic feature called
The Opponent released by
Lionsgate. In 2002, his first theatrical documentary feature
The Trials of Henry Kissinger was released. Based on the book
The Trial of Henry Kissinger by
Christopher Hitchens, this film is the first of Jarecki's sweeping indictments of the perils of power. The film was the winner of the 2002 Amnesty International Award and was nominated for an
Independent Spirit Award.
Trials has been broadcast in over thirty countries and launched the
Sundance Channel's DOCday venture in the U.S. as well as the
BBC's digital channel,
BBC Four in the U.K. Jarecki distinguished himself as a filmmaker unafraid of serious, penetrating investigations with his 2005 film
Why We Fight about the role of America's
military-industrial complex in leading the nation into the tragic quagmire of the
Iraq War. The film won both the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and a Peabody Award. He also received a nomination for
Best Documentary Screenplay from the
Writers Guild of America for the film. Alongside directors
Alex Gibney,
Morgan Spurlock, and
Rachel Grady, Jarecki directed a segment of the 2010 feature
Freakonomics based on the 2005 book
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by
Steven D. Levitt and
Stephen J. Dubner. The film premiered at the
Tribeca Film Festival that year. In 2011, Jarecki returned to the Sundance Film Festival with his Emmy Award-winning film
Reagan which went on to be released in the U.S. by
HBO on what would have been the
40th President's 100th birthday. The next year,
The House I Live In, his film about America's
war on drugs, won Jarecki a second Grand Jury Prize at Sundance as well as a second Peabody Award. Achieving a level of mainstream recognition, the film's producers included
Danny Glover,
John Legend,
Brad Pitt, and
Russell Simmons. In order to create a genuine impact, the film was exhibited in over 130 U.S. prisons, churches, and statehouses, as well as on Capitol Hill. Along with the music video of the same name, featuring John Legend, and the viral short
Just Say No...to the War on Drugs, (both directed by Jarecki), the film is credited with changing the national conversation on U.S. drug policy. In 2014, Jarecki took part in the first
Ted Talk in the history of
Cuba at Havana's Teatro Nacional. Events that occurred in the days leading up to the talk became the subject of Jarecki's 2016 short film,
The Cyclist (El Ciclista) which he directed for
The New Yorker/
Amazon. Jarecki served as executive producer on the 2015 documentary feature film
(T)ERROR, directed by Lyric Cabral and David Felix Sutcliff, which won Jarecki a Sundance Special Jury Prize and his second Emmy Award. That same year, he also executive produced Laura Israel's feature documentary ''
Don't Blink – Robert Frank'' about the late legendary photographer's work and career. His next film,
The King, produced by
Steven Soderbergh,
Errol Morris, and
Rosanne Cash, premiered at both the
Cannes Film Festival and Sundance. Nominated for a
Grammy Award for Best Music Film, The King is a musical road trip in
Elvis Presley's 1963 Rolls-Royce that features
Alec Baldwin,
Chuck D,
Emmylou Harris,
Mike Myers,
Rosanne Cash,
Van Jones, and
Ethan Hawke, among others. All are party to tracing the rise and fall of Elvis as a metaphor for the country he left behind. Alongside the film, Jarecki created a series of music videos for artists such as
Lana Del Rey,
M. Ward,
The Handsome Family,
Immortal Technique, and the
Stax Music Academy All-Stars. In 2018, Jarecki's first public contemporary art exhibit, entitled Promised Land, was featured at Miami
Art Basel as part of
"This is Not America" at the Faena Hotel, Miami Beach. A multiscreen video presentation, Promised Land was inspired by Jarecki's 2018 film,
The King. In 2019, it was announced that Jarecki is returning to dramatic filmmaking with a yet-untitled action film about a Saharan,
Tuareg nomad, who seeks revenge for a crime committed against his tribal customs. Jarecki wrote the screenplay with his son Jonas Jarecki, based on a best-selling novel.
Addison O'Dea is producing.
Public policy As a
public intellectual on U.S. domestic and international policy, Jarecki has appeared on a variety of national television programs including
The Daily Show,
The Colbert Report,
Real Time with Bill Maher,
Fox & Friends, and
Charlie Rose. In 2010, he created the short film
Move Your Money, encouraging Americans to move their banking from "too big to fail" banks into smaller community banks and credit unions. It became a viral sensation leading to an estimated 4 million Americans moving their money out of major banks. Jarecki is also the founder and executive director of
The Eisenhower Project, an academic public policy group, dedicated, in the spirit of
Dwight D. Eisenhower, to studying the forces that shape American foreign policy. He has been a visiting fellow at
Brown University's
Watson Institute for International Studies and is the author of
The American Way of War (2008), published by Simon & Schuster/Free Press. Jarecki has also participated as a speaker at several international conferences including Ted,
Nantucket Project, and
will.i.am's "TRANS4M" gathering for the i.am.angel Foundation. At the 2014 Nantucket Project, Jarecki conducted a public interview with
WikiLeaks editor-in-chief
Julian Assange as a
hologram, beamed in to Nantucket from his place of asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Jarecki wrote in
The Guardian before the event, "it crosses my mind I may be abetting a crime or violating international extradition laws. But I reassure myself that, in this regard, the worldwide web remains a kind of wild wild west, and the virtual escape of a person is not (yet?) a crime." As a sequel to this interview, Jarecki publicly interviewed former U.S. Army soldier
Chelsea Manning at the 2017 Nantucket Project, after her 35-year prison sentence was commuted by
President Obama. In
The Guardian, Jarecki wrote, "Manning sees connections in the duty of the soldier who uncovers high crimes, to the death of secrecy in the digital age, to the role of the individual in a society where privacy is as besieged as sexual orientation." In April 2020, Jarecki created the Trump Death Clock, a 56-foot billboard in
Times Square,
New York City, that attributed U.S.
COVID-19 deaths to
Donald Trump and his administration's alleged delayed response to the
COVID-19 pandemic. ==Filmography==