Men of War
Jen Gatien & Billy Corben / United States & Canada / 2024 / European Premiere / 103 min
Reality surpasses fiction in a real-life action movie about a former US soldier's failed coup d'état in Venezuela - told in incredible detail by the man himself.
It sounds like the plot of an 80s action movie, but sometimes reality surpasses even the wildest fiction. Five years ago, a group of local rebels and a handful of American mercenaries set out to overthrow Venezuela’s socialist government. The secret and highly risky project was codenamed Operation Gideon. Everything went wrong.
The mastermind behind the operation was former elite soldier Jordan Goudreau, who through his security firm Silvercorp had made contact with the country’s opposition from their base in Miami and the toxic environment surrounding Donald Trump.
In a true scoop of an angle, Goudreau himself tells the wild story of the spectacular and failed coup attempt in all its incredible and tragicomic details. Directors Billy Corben (‘Cocaine Cowboys’) and Jen Gatien not only uncover the course of events. They also map out all (self-)deception that made it possible to imagine that the operation would ever succeed in the first place. But perhaps the final, fatal chapter in Goudreau’s story has not yet been written.