Denial
2024 · 23m · United States
Directed by Paul Moakley, Daniel Lombroso
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tense
After Donald Trump claimed the 2020 presidential election was "rigged," Maricopa County's Republican chairman Bill Gates faced abuse and death threats for refusing to deny the results — a portrait of one elected official's stand amid a wave of election denialism.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a straight political documentary about a Republican doing the obvious right thing—which sounds like a consensus applause machine, except the filmmakers don't let you off easy; they linger on the mundane horror of ordinary institutional courage being treated as radical betrayal.
Moakley and Lombroso understand that the restraint IS the argument: the formal discipline of letting Gates's testimony and the archival record speak, the careful editing that lets tension build through what's *not* sensationalized, positions this squarely in the vein of essential political portraiture that prioritizes witness over spectacle.
The decision to center Gates's voice and measured demeanor against the chaos surrounding him—letting his quiet consistency be the dramatic engine rather than manufactured confrontation—is the choice that makes this land; everything else serves that single tonal commitment.