Our Nixon Information

Our Nixon is an award winning, all-archival documentary providing a unique view of the Nixon presidency through the use of home movies filmed by top Nixon aides combined with other historical material.

Background

Throughout the Richard Nixon presidency (1969-1974) three of his top White House aides -- chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, domestic affairs adviser John Ehrlichman and special assistant Dwight Chapin -- obsessively documented their experiences with Super 8 home movie cameras creating a unique visual record consisting of over 500 reels of home movies. These films were seized by the FBI during the Watergate investigation, then filed away for almost 40 years. Our Nixon is an all-archival documentary presenting these home movies together with other material, including excerpts from the secretly recorded White House phone tapes, contemporary news reports, and later interviews with the three staffers themselves, to create an intimate and complex portrait of the Nixon presidency.

Release

Our Nixon made its North American debut at 2013 South by Southwest and its international debut at the 42nd International Film Festival Rotterdam. The film has subsequently screened at notable film festivals, including, among others, AFI DOCS in Washington, DC, the Los Angeles Film Festival, the 39th Annual Seattle International Film Festival, where Our Nixon won the 2013 Grand Jury award for Best Documentary Film, the 51st Ann Arbor Film Festival, where it won the Ken Burns Award for Best of the Festival, the 11th Annual Independent Film Festival of Boston, where it won the Karen Schmeer Award for Excellence in Documentary Editing, the 19th Annual Nantucket Film Festival, where it won the Adrienne Shelly Award for Excellence in Filmmaking, and the 9th Annual Traverse City Film Festival, where it won the Founders Prize for Best Documentary.

Our Nixon was also chosen as the closing night film for the prestigious Film Society of Lincoln Center and Museum of Modern Art New Directors/New Films festival in New York City.

Our Nixon made its United States television premiere on CNN on August 1, 2013 and will be released theatrically by Cinedigm on August 30, 2013.