RE-INVENTING IR STUDIES, Theory, Research Practice and Documentary Movie Screening of Project Z. The Final Global Event

James Der Derian

Michael Hintze Chair of International Security Studies
and Director of the CISS, University of Sydney

He is author most recently of Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (Routledge, 2nd ed., 2009) and Critical Practices in International Theory (Routledge, 2009), and co-editor with Costas Constantinou of Sustainable Diplomacies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). He has produced three film documentaries with Udris Film, Virtual Y2K, After 9/11, and most recently, Human Terrain, which won the Audience Award at the 2009 Festival dei Popoli in Florence and has been an official selection at numerous international film festivals. His most recent documentary, Project Z: The Final Global Event (co-produced with Phillip Gara), premiered at the 2012 DOK Leipzig Film Festival.

Project Z: The Final Global Event is a documentary film by James Der Derian, professor of international studies at Sydney University, and Phillip Gara, a New York based filmmaker.  Project Z (as in zombie) begins in the Mojave Desert and ends on Wall Street, tracking from the end of the Cold War to the wake of the Arab Spring, the emergence of a military-industrial-media-entertainment network. Project Z reveals how this unholy alliance creates and amplifies the crises it seeks to anticipate and prevent through war games, computer models, complex financial systems, and networked technology. Combining rare footage from inside the war machine with corrosive commentary by leading critics of global violence and inequality, the film challenges the living to reclaim the past from the undead and to write their own future before the final global event.