Manufacturing the Threat returns with hard look at homemade-bomb caper in B.C., at VIFF Centre October 15 to 20

In its first return here since DOXA. documentary raises troubling questions about entrapment, national security, and democracy

By Janet Smith

Accused in 2013 plot to plant bombs at the B.C. Legislature, John Nuttall and Amanda Korody, seen in the new documentary Manufacturing the Threat, were freed after a B.C. Supreme Court judge found police had entrapped them.

Manufacturing the Threat screens at VIFF Centre from October 15 to 20

ON ONE LEVEL, Amy Miller’s Manufacturing the Threat is a deeply disturbing documentary that traces the infamous 2013 case of John Nuttall and his wife Amanda Korody, both converts to Islam (taking the names Omar and Ana). The couple spent three years in prison for planning a terrorist bombing before the courts found they’d been entrapped by undercover law enforcement.

But it turns out their story is not an isolated case: the film uses their pathetic case as a launching pad to reveal the ways Canada's policing and national security agencies, granted additional powers after 9/11, break laws with little accountability or oversight.

If you missed the film when it debuted at DOXA fest last spring, here's your chance to catch it again—and face the fact that anti-terrorism measures may be running as rampant here as they are south of the border. As Miller told Stir last spring during DOXA: "I think the film’s argument is that there’s a lot of money to be made, there are a lot of people vested in maintaining this methodology and this notion of national security because they benefit. It’s a big industry and it’s spent the last 20 years saying the fight is terrorism."  

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