Neo Ned

Ned was a boy who looked up to his father, though his father was a small-time crook who spent most of his life in jail. With no family of his own, Ned falls in with the Aryan Brotherhood, and before long he is placed in a psychiatric hospital. There he meets a Black woman who believes Hitler has been reborn inside her, and he cannot look away from her. The whole risk of the film sits in that setup: it puts a young neo-Nazi in the same room as someone his ideology would erase and watches what happens. What critics kept returning to in Van Fischer’s film is that it is carried by the acting rather than the writing; Jeremy Renner and Gabrielle Union give their characters more than the script provides. It screened at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005, travelled festivals for three years and was broadcast on 19 August 2008.