Alexander Horwath's
HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT
(2025)

Opening April 3rd at Anthology Film Archives
followed by engagements in Los Angeles and Austin

"A masterpiece of applied cinephilia..." –J. Hoberman, ARTFORUM

“This transfixing gem of an essay film [is] sheer delight from start to finish, and looks wonderful courtesy of cinematographer Michael Palm.” –Kieron Corless, Sight & Sound

 
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.

Alexander Horwath
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.
–Anthology Film Archives

“A movie star who emerged in the mid-1930s, Fonda starred as Abe Lincoln, Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp, and the honest naval officer Mister Roberts[…] He fought for democracy in the Spanish Civil War on-screen and in World War II in actuality. He personified New Deal democracy, Cold War liberalism, and – thanks to his rebellious children – the 1960s generation gap. Was he also, as more than one person puts it in Alexander Horwath’s erudite, entertaining three-hour meta-biopic, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT, the ‘quintessential American’? Embraced by cinephiles at festivals from Berlin to Buenos Aires and beyond, HFFP more than makes the case for Fonda’s centrality in the American imaginary – what Norman Mailer called the nation’s dream life. […] A masterpiece of applied cinephilia, HFFP is a melancholy reminder that the mass Hollywood-driven illusions that produced Fonda and Reagan et al. are no more. The spell has been broken. Not that we’re awake: We live the Total Cinema Bardo created by talk radio, cable news, reality TV, iPhones, and social media.”
–J. Hoberman, ARTFORUM

FESTIVAL SCREENINGS:
Berlin Film Festival, World Premiere (February)
Museum of Modern Art, Doc Fortnight, NY Premiere (February 23)

Festival de la Cinémathèque française, Paris (March 8)
Open City Documentary Festival, London (May 10)
Film Mutations, Zagreb & Rijeka (January 24-30),

Göteborg Film Festival, Göteberg (Jan 24-Feb 2)

Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (March)

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