Stranger Than Fiction: Shoba, you grew up with these movies. When you watch this film, what is your reaction? What is it in this film that resonates with you? And you were talking earlier about other parts of Yugoslav film history that aren’t included in this film that were meaningful to you.

Shoba: This movie is absolutely realistic, there’s nothing much to add to the story. There remain so many interesting movies which have nothing to do with Communism. Numerous movies, in film noir style, movies for children that I grew up with. There were so many things happening. My entire childhood was like in the movie. Tito wanted to see a movie a day, it was like that for us, for children as well. There’s also the dark side of Yugoslavian cinema, of which not much was really said. There were movies that were banned, directors who were imprisoned, like Lazar Stojanović, who made the film Plastic Jesus. Literally after one screening, the film was banned for 30 years, which was not even that radical. This was in 1974, 1975. It was a time when Yugoslavia was at a crossroads. Everybody knew that Tito, sooner or later, would die, and that something will happen. Things were going in that direction. There were little nationalist uprisings in Croatia, Serbia and other republics. People already had ideas about what was going to happen. Artists are the first to react to the situation, and, of course, artists were reacting. And some of those situations were brutal.

STF: David, let me ask you as an outsider to this world, but as a lover of cinema, what were the things that struck you about this film?

David Leitner: I was aware of a lot of the history of that cinema. I was struck on so many levels. I think the reason I’m up here is because I wrote a note to Thom after I learned that the film had been programmed, because it’s a brilliant film. The film is very sly, it wraps a tremendous amount of subtle history in what I call candy coating—a beautiful film score, it’s very well directed. But embedded in this film is the history of the 20th century, and it’s an ugly history. It’s a history that, having been born in the middle of the last century, I can’t escape. In East Germany I saw film studios just like this, where the timbers holding up the flat still had bark on them. I saw the critiques that were threaded through this, and I also saw the sense of loss, the elegy in this, and was extremely moved. The Battle of Neretva is an incredible battle in the war against Germany, and I think it could be made into another kind of film. Tito was a brilliant antifascist, and a brilliant military leader. Now, that doesn’t mean he had to extend his stay and become president for life. There are so many critiques of him in this film. I don’t know what it is with dictators and cinema. I think Lenin said, “For us, cinema is the most important of all the arts.” And it was every single one of them. In our time, it’s Saddam Hussein, it’s Kim Jong Il with his film collection. Stalin inherited Joseph Goebbels library, he watched a film every night. I don’t know what it is, but it has something to do with the 20th century, because cinema doesn’t have the same power that it did. This is the time of social media, when everyone has an HD camera embedded in their phone. In those days, it wasn’t interactive. The projector projected the image out to you, and you received the messages meant to be received. This film is telling that story too, in a very sly way.

STF: Shoba, I wonder what some of your personal favorite films are from that era.

Shoba: It’s really hard to say. Every Sunday morning we would watch some kind of show about the Yugoslavian army, and its strength, and then it would go to a partisan movie. But honestly, as a kid, that represented reality. Actually, Western movies were shown at night, there was always this weird combination of Western movies and Communist, partisan movies. It’s hard to pick your favorite, but mine was Walter Defends Sarajevo. The main character kills like 6,000 Germans within 10 minutes, which is a funny thing. I remember movie propaganda was so strong. I remember as a kid running through the streets and collecting the movie fliers which had been thrown out of airplanes. Cinema was so huge. But the way movies were filmed in Yugoslavia, every single republic had its own studio for movies, and every republic had a movie quota. It was a government plan.

Leitner: Did each republic have a studio?

Shoba: Pretty much. For example, every major republic capital had it’s own film laboratory and distribution house.

Leitner: At that time, there had been many attempts at European unification. Tito tried it by forcing a number of ethnicities, nations to band together. During the Yugoslavian period, was some kind of nationalism tolerated in these films?

Shoba: All Communist movies were pretty much about unity, about brotherhood. But no single nation was deprived of it. They didn’t avoid showing religious leaders in movies, like priests or bishops. It was also very visible which partisan brigade was Serb or Croat or Montenegran. There was always this kind of representation, that was important to show in Communist cinema.

Leitner: People were allowed to have pride in their nationalist background.

Shoba: Absolutely, that was key in how everybody must be represented.

STF: Shoba, in your return visits to Sarajevo, you frequently go to the Sarajevo film festival. Can you describe what that festival means for contemporary cinema in Sarajevo.

Shoba: Sarajevo did have it’s own film studios, which were unfortunately totally destroyed in the war. We had all of the facilities that you see in Avala in Belgrade, although Avala was much bigger. But it was all destroyed, all the equipment was destroyed. We had to start from scratch. Then, by the will of individuals and interest, movies started being made again after the war. Right now we can’t speak about some kind of film industry, but we can speak of a really strong movie scene, and really good films. We have the best original festival in the Balkans, that’s for sure. Every year many important movies are shown there. I’m just afraid that there’s no development to organize production, movie studios. Not like it used to be.

Leitner: Is there an independent movie scene?

Shoba: Well, everything is independent. You as a filmmaker in Bosnia, you have to struggle a lot to make a film. You have to beg, and go around to try and find sponsors all over Europe and the world, which is complicated. The state itself does not fund films properly, they give some limited funding. Just renting the equipment is more than 50% of the film budget normally.

Stranger Than Fiction: Marty, you came to this story because Paco is an extended family member. Can you describe that connection?

Marty Syjuco: My brother Jamie, who appears in the film, he’s married to Mimi, Paco’s sister. So Paco’s my brother’s brother-in-law. I didn’t know him very well when all of this was happening, he was about ten years younger than me. I met him at my brother’s wedding in Cebu. When all of this started happening I was already living in Manila, and then I moved to New York. We all knew they got the wrong guy, and we thought the courts would figure it out, correct their mistake. It was really only when the Supreme Court elevated the sentence to death—I was here in New York, and I was shocked. I remember telling Michael about that, and it was Michael’s idea to pick up the camera and start documenting the story.

STF: Michael, I know you’ve both just returned from Spain, where the film had it’s Spanish premiere. And you’ve recorded a new ending to the film which we were hoping to show tonight, but because of technical difficulties we weren’t able to do that. But can you bring us up to date on where the story is and what the screening was like in Spain?

Michael Collins: This ends with the Spanish prison really treating Paco pretty poorly. After we premiered six months ago, we had people from the Spanish embassy, luckily, that came to the New York screenings, and down in Washington, D.C. Paco said that things started to change, they started to treat him much better. They were basically treating him like he was a terrorist. They were trying to break him, and get him to admit his guilt for over a year, which was really strange. Now they’re treating him like someone they’re eventually going to put out on parole. They’re giving him more privileges than he’s ever had before, and it seems like they’re preparing him for the outside. But it’s a process that could take years. He’s more hopeful than he’s ever been. We went to spend some time with him when we were there, and his sister came, and we shot some more.

STF: And you were able to show him the film.

Collins: We were able to show him the film, which was kind of intense—watching him watch the film. Also, we were afraid it would be kind of traumatic. He hadn’t seen a lot of the stuff, he was in prison and was watching all of the media coverage. We had 50 hours worth of media that we harvested from. But he said he felt so empowered afterwards, he said that night he slept better than he’s ever slept. He has a lot of patience, he knows it will take a long time for him to get out. But he was in a country where everyone thought that he was a monster, and now to get sort of out there in the world, he feels sort of vindicated.

STF: What are the prospects of showing this in the Philippines?

Syjuco: Well, I’m Filipino and the end goal is to bring it to the Philippines, where it can have the most impact, not just for Paco, but the 40% that are languishing in prison that weren’t given a fair trial. That’s the percentage they say are in the prisons who could be wrongfully convicted, just like Paco. There are literally thousands of Pacos out there, not just in the Philippines. That’s where I do want to bring it. After Spain, that’s our next goal, hopefully sometime next year. It’s going to be a little challenging because there isn’t really an audience for documentaries there, but maybe the Filipinos in the room can help us spread the word.

Audience: How did you get access to Mrs. Chiong, and how did you frame the project to her?

Collins: We were in touch with her from the beginning, and she would not talk to us for a long time. Finally, she said she wanted to air her side, and counter all of the lies that the Larrañagas are telling you. And that’s how she eventually let us through the door. She had three interviews with us over the six years we were in production, and I actually shot one of them. When you bring the camera to her, she doesn’t have a filter, she just kind of shows off a little bit. It was really strange. She knew that we were spending all of this time with the family, telling their story. She’d just never been challenged by the media before, and she couldn’t stop herself. We have so much more footage of her, kind of off-the-wall stuff. But we were very careful. She’s the first victim in this thing, her daughters went missing, and I think the challenge, aside from getting access to her, was also how to handle her as a character. Starting this project, and being so angry at her and hearing all the lies that she was telling people that were going to cost these seven guys their lives, I had to figure out a way to transform that to compassion a little bit. And treat her like the grieving mother that she is who just made some bad decisions.

Audience: How do you maintain objectivity as a filmmaker?

Collins: As far as our roles as filmmakers and participants, that’s a tough line to blur. Marty’s a member of the family, it was important to put it into the film. It becomes your life, I’m not going to lie. I love this family, Paco is like my family. You have to deal with that. But when you’re in the editing room, you have to make choices that are fair to everyone who’s involved. We took two years to edit this, and it was so complex. We brought in a really experienced editor to help us at the end, Eric Metzgar. It was important to have other people on our team who weren’t so closely connected help us sort through that.

STF: Given that it’s such an interconnected world now and the film has been in the news, have their been responses in the Philippines, word that may have traveled there?

Syjuco: So much time has passed since Paco’s story was the “trial of the century,” and people are now starting to allow themselves to think that perhaps there’s another side to this story. We thought there was going to be a little more backlash in the Philippines, but I think it’s because it hasn’t screened there yet. It’s on the internet, but we’ve been very careful about posting things online. We don’t give out DVDs, they are not yet available for sale, but they will be soon!

Audience: Where, if anywhere, did DNA evidence factor into forensics in the case?

Collins: They didn’t collect any. We interviewed the medical experts, the forensic pathologist, the medical examiner, we’ve seen all of the records. There’s a lot of detail that we couldn’t put in the film, but the prosecution basically blocked the dental records from being presented. They said that they found half of one sperm, maybe, but that they found it with a blacklight. So it’s not even conclusive. Honestly, it’s a joke. Paco’s family really wanted to do DNA testing, and they said, we’ll pay for it, exhume the body. So they’re hiding something. There’s no evidence that she was even raped.

Audience: Is Paco’s story dead in the Philippines?

Collins: A Philippine story just came out yesterday about Paco, but it was their international reporter based in London. In the Philippines it’s old news, it’s 14 years ago. People remember it, there were some journalists who wrote about it for Philippine newspapers who came to the Tribeca Film Festival. It seems like people are ready to look at it a second time, to look at it from a new angle. A generation has almost passed, so people are open.

Syjuco: Now with online bloggers, the news and the media it’s a different world now. That’s why, hopefully with the film as well, Paco can have a second chance in life. He was 19 when he was arrested, and he’s turning 34 this year, so it’s almost 15 years.

Collins: We just launched a website, www.freepaconow.com. It’s being translated into Spanish, but it’s also in English. You can go there and sign a petition and send letters to officials. He is now, hopefully, on the path to parole. Like we said, it could take years and every single day that he’s there is one too many. We have a facebook page and are on twitter as well.

[Q&A has been edited for length and clarity]

Stranger Than Fiction: What brought you to the story, and what led you to take control of it? I would think once the news broke, the revelation had been made, that there would be lots of people who would want to tell this story.

Douglas Newman: We got to the story soon after it broke. I was in college at Brandeis University, and was assigned The Education of Little Tree in class. My father, in passing, mentioned remembering reading something in the New York Times about it being a hoax. I mentioned it to my professor, who kind of blew me off. The long and short of it was that I went to a different professor who said, you should do a project on it. Laura, who was a graduate student writing a book about fake ethnic biographies—yes, there are enough to fill a book. Then about twelve years later, after working in documentaries, I approached Marco and Laura, and said, let’s do this for real. No one had done it, and there were a lot of challenges that made it so that no one had done it.

STF: Can you talk about those challenges?

Newman: One is a lack of people who want to talk. It took us a long time to get people who were willing to talk. Another is a lack of archival footage. We squeezed every bit of archival footage of Asa and Forrest that existed, those were the two biggest challenges.

Marco Ricci: Well, also, his life is confusing.

Laura Browder: It’s a very tangled web. We had to do some simplification, just to be able to tell the story coherently. His life was a mess, he moved around a lot, he had these different identities…

STF: Talk about the search for archival footage, because what you did pull up is kind of amazing stuff.

Newman: I think our biggest find was in somebody’s basement, it was a two-inch tape of his campaign commercial for governor. We found stuff at a local Alabama television station that they didn’t even know they had. Because I had gotten it years back, and then Marco and I went down to Montgomery and searched their archives and we didn’t find it, and he didn’t know he had it. The liberty essays, the audio, we used a couple at the end, we got from one of his friends who had the cassette tapes.

Ricci: There were months of detective work that had to go into this.

Audience: Did you guys get in touch with his family? What happened to them?

Browder: His family was also very elusive. His wife would never return phone messages, his kids would never return phone messages. We did track down one relative eventually, who was a very interesting person, but didn’t want to be interviewed on camera because he didn’t want to be identified with a violent white supremacist.

Ricci: We had a screening in his hometown, and a lot of his grandkids were there. We met them and they really were appreciative to—and his son too, to an extent—but they were appreciative of the portrayal because ours is not as condemning as he was in the papers, I don’t think. We tried to present a fairly rounded piece. So we met them there and they were appreciative of the handling of it, which meant a lot to me.

STF: Can you talk about getting those interviews with the former Klansmen? Or for all I know they’re current Klansmen. What was the process?

Ricci: Douglas had met this guy Wayne Greenhaw, who was sort of the intro. But a lot of it was just like, we would go down three or four times, and then they would talk to us. Like Ray Andrews, he stood us up a couple of times, and then we paid him like 300 bucks or something, and he invited us to go out to some restaurant in the hills.

Audience: Do you, or does the Cherokee tribe, think he is part Cherokee?

Browder: For a very long time, The Education of Little Tree was on sale in reservation bookstores. We actually talked to the leader of a Cherokee cultural organization who still loves the book, and had her grandparents give it to her to read when she was younger. Has he been authenticated by the Cherokees? No.

Ricci: Well, what is Cherokee? That’s very dicey. Are you on the rolls, is it blood, is it cultural? There are tribes in Alabama who are totally not Cherokee compared to the tribes in Oklahoma, but they believe they’re Cherokee. It’s a really loaded question.

Newman: He’s not culturally Cherokee and he’s not on any rolls.

Audience: Do you think this was something where people enact another ethnicity to reinforce their feeling of whiteness?

Browder: Yes, absolutely. There is a long history of white supremacists embracing Native Americans as a pure, doomed race. In that sense, Asa Carter fell squarely into that tradition. That misty footage you saw at the beginning of the movie, that was from the first supposedly all Native American movie, The Silent Enemy, which starred a former colored janitor from North Carolina who had reinvented himself as a Native American. Asa Carter was kind of the flip side of that.

Audience: Did his wife and children know what he was doing?

Newman: She knew, his kids certainly knew. I think they really were kept kind of behind the scenes, I don’t think they went with him anywhere. But they definitely knew.

Audience: How exactly was the fraud uncovered?

Newman: It was actually uncovered twice, three times maybe. It keeps getting uncovered. People forget, and then it pops back up. It was originally uncovered in 1976 in a very small article buried on like page 26 in the New York Times by Wayne Greenhaw, who’s in the film. He wrote something when Josey Wales came out, wondering if Forrest Carter was really this guy Asa Carter. No one paid attention to it. His publisher denied it, his camp denied it, and everyone seemed to be fine with it. Then Dan Carter, when the book started becoming really popular, right around Dances With Wolves, that’s when Carter wrote a full page op-ed piece in the New York Times. Then Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote something, and that’s what got people’s attention. It’s funny because it was on Oprah’s book list until 2007.

Browder: The history of Asa Carter is the history of our cultural amnesia, really. We kept finding out that he wasn’t who he appeared to be, and then we forgot again, because we wanted so badly to believe as a nation in this mystical, magical Native American identity that he wanted to portray.

STF: After spending all this time on this character, what are your personal feelings on Asa Carter, Forrest Carter?

Ricci: We’ve had arguments for hours about it. But obviously as a director, you sort of fall in love with your characters. Not that I’m in love with Asa, but he’s certainly a fascinating guy, and I have my own thoughts on the truth of his journey, but I think I’ll keep them to myself, because I think that’s what’s enjoyable about it. If you talk to people who knew him, they would insist that he was a transformed guy.

Browder: He was successful because he was a cypher, he was sort of a Rorschach blot that audiences could project their fantasies onto. We all hope and wish that our audience will do the same thing.

Ricci: One thing you have to give him credit for was that he was really smart and talented. No doubt about it. If you look at the stuff he wrote in the 50s, it’s awful, but he knew what would get people emotionally.

Audience: Was he aware of the violence that his speeches could cause?

Ricci: I certainly think he was aware. He certainly was a believer in segregation, no doubt about it. It was war to him, he was fine with that at that point in time.

[Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.]

Stranger Than Fiction: Erwin, let me start with you, because you kind of got this started. What got you interested in this subject and set you on the course of writing this book?

Erwin Strauss: I saw a movie in the 1950s called Passport to Pimlico. It served the function for me that The Mouse That Roared served to a lot of other people. It was about a person who discovered that he had a charter that entitled him to secede from the United Kingdom in this little neighborhood in London somewhere. Hilarity ensued, and eventually everything ended with a reconciliation, which always disappointed me. I wanted to see the thing continue indefinitely. Later on I got interested in the prospect of a predecessor to internet gambling, if it had worked out, taking bets by citizens’ band radio on a ship on the high seas. If I were successful at that I would have ended up doing internet gambling.

STF: So you were taking the bets?

Strauss: Yeah, we were taking the bets. But for one reason or another it didn’t quite work out. But I had done a lot of research leading up to it, and some years later my publisher suggested, why don’t you put it together into a book? So that I did, and it has sort of become a cottage industry over time. People keep coming back to me and asking about this or that, and I give them a little file of countries that I hear of.

STF: Jody, you came across this book and that’s what got you started making the film, is that right?

Jody Shapiro: Yeah, probably about seven or eight years ago I came across the book at a bookstore on St. Mark’s place, and I was just fascinated by it. I picked it up, and the title alone grabbed me because it was a concept that I never heard of. And people were actually doing this. When you flip through the book there are examples of people trying to do it. I think Sealand and Hutt River are in the book. The more I started talking about it, the more I started researching with Denis, we realized this is a pretty big topic, mostly because it was very hard to define what makes a country. Through the micronation, we thought, why not make a film that explores that topic?

STF: Denis, were you part of the United Nations shoot here?

Denis Seguin: Yeah, unlike most writers on documentaries I actually went on every shoot, just for the food alone.

STF: Can you talk about what it took to film at the United Nations, and how that went?

Seguin: If you are watching closely, there are quite a few coups in there. We had the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations. Hooking them was really big. Just to get into the U.N. is fairly straightforward, but its tremendously bureaucratic. Once we were there, they were sort of nervous about what we were planning on doing, but we were able to cajole them. At one point, when we were shooting in the General Assembly, I played a game where I was taking the woman who were making sure we weren’t doing anything wrong, and telling them a joke and leading them up the hallway so that Jody could set the camera up quickly and Gregory could do his moment. We didn’t want to go right up to the podium.

STF: You got close.

Seguin: We got very close.

STF: Gregory, can you bring us up to date on the Free State of Caroline, and is everybody here allowed to join?

Gregory Green: Everybody’s allowed to join as a citizen. All you have to do is send me your contact information, and you don’t even have to say please. We have a very open immigration policy. Actually, the documentary has been very good in terms of the citizenship level, we’re now up to almost 4,000. Actually, I’m an artist, and this project is part of a whole series of works that I’m doing. What I talk about in the U.N. speech of claiming all of the disputed states is an upcoming show that I’m doing. But Caroline is doing very well, and I’ve actually found two other small little islands that kind of fit the criteria to potentially become another state. But in reality it’s a large responsibility, and I’m not sure I want to do that.

Audience: What was the artistic vision behind the interviews?

Shapiro: Most of them were obviously the countries that we went to, and we were fortunate to get some pretty stunning places. The composition of it, I wanted to treat these leaders as heads of state in some sense, and give them the royal portrait kind of look. But just the idea of space and environment, bringing Erwin to the sea was, I thought, a nice touch. I didn’t want to bring someone to an office. And to contrast the leaders and the people associated with the micronational world, with the world, and then have the experts someplace neutral.

Audience: I’m a sociologist and we teach that the definition of a state is the entity that has the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. If I remember Prince Roy of Sealand was tied up by those German sailors and then the British actually rescued him.

Strauss: No, he rescued himself. They put him and his family in a boat that went to England, and he came back one night in a helicopter with a baseball bat. They showed the Germans being lined up there, that was his own doing. As the commentator noted in the film, there was never at any time the involvement of the British authorities, which, as he put it, established that Sealand was a law into itself.

Audience: How come that definition was never mentioned in the film.

Seguin: Strictly speaking, there is no legal definition. So what we refer to, and what a lot of the micronation community refers to is the Montevideo Accord. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was trying to assert himself globally, he convened a number of nations of the New World, if you want to use that expression. Erwin, you wrote about this—

Strauss: The current codification of the line goes back to the Middle Ages. One of the principles was a territory, a population and defense of the territory by the use of arms.

Audience: How did you choose which micronations to film, and were there any that you shot that you didn’t end up using?

Shapiro: There are a lot out there, you can Google micronations and a lot will pop up. They range from kids and their parents to places like Hutt River. We had a big list and went through it. I was looking for two things. One, the story behind it, because ultimately, there were a lot of compelling stories that we wanted to hear. Each place represents a different idea of what a country could be. Each person had a very unique story to tell. Just because of budget and time, we went to about 16 different countries to shoot the six micronations that we went to. We had to really narrow it down, so basically everything that we shot is on there.

Strauss: You also said you had a preference for the places where the food was good.

Schapiro: Yeah, if you ever go to Seborga, there’s a great restaurant there.

Audience: I was wondering about Sealand. Did you get in there, and what was it like in there?

Shapiro: I’ll be honest. Unfortunately, Sealand had a fire right before I got there. Which was okay because Sealand plays a big part in the history of micronations, so I wanted to portray them through the stock footage that we had. So we couldn’t get up to the tower. But to even get in the waters we had to apply for a visa three times, we got denied. So it took us three years, and that’s not a joke. If you ever write them and want to go visit, they’re pretty strict. They finally came around and we shot them in their home in the U.K.

Audience: What are some of the interesting stories that you decided not to go with for whatever reason? Why did you decide not to focus on the larger micronations?

Shapiro: Again, it was something that we thought about a lot, where do you draw the line. I wanted this to be about the micronational world, these personal stories, and about what these places represent. The minute we start getting into states that are really fighting for something, politics comes into the way. I wanted to show that the idea of country could be a lot more than politics and borders and policies, so we wanted to keep it on that front.

Strauss: That’s why the book is called “How to Start Your Own Country.” My criterion was something that some individual or small group could actually intentionally undertake to do, rather than some existing ethnic group that lived in a territory and then decides to secede. That’s a whole different dynamic, and is not much help to the average reader interested in starting his own country.

Gregory: I would add that it’s also about each one of you rethinking your own relationship to your own state, your own nation, and the relationship between nations in general. Globally, things are changing a lot, from individuals to small groups. Countries have been changing regularly without the use of violence—the Arab Spring, the Arab Summer. There’s endless examples of that. A lot of that is a single one of you stepping back and rethinking how the world works.

Audience: As a fellow Canadian, I want to know if the Quebec issue had any effect on the film, and the other question is, do any women start countries?

Seguin: First of all, Quebec was tricky, and we did actually have a sit-down interview with the Canadian ambassador to the U.N. And before we even started rolling he said, I just want to say one thing, I can’t talk about Quebec. That did sort of set it up for us that we wouldn’t talk about Quebec. And also, we had some interesting, individual stories to tell. In terms of women, I think it’s safe to say that this is a lot about royal sceptres, big egos. Women basically have more common sense.

Audience: It appears that the host countries, I guess you’d call them, tolerate the micronations. Can you expound on that?

Shapiro: It did vary pretty widely, and Kevin Baugh, the president of Molossia, was very circumspect about what he did and did not do. He said he did everything up to the point where he thinks the FBI is going to roll up his driveway. He really doesn’t push it. Prince Leonard [of Hutt River] pushes it. I think he did one day in prison in the early 70s, and the MP Barry Hoss told us they made a mistake with Hutt River. They thought it was a joke, they had written the letters, Dear Prince Leonard, and it came back and bit Australia in the ass. They said, we made a mistake, we treated him as a joke and the joke has backfired, so now let’s just ignore him. Similarly, in England, we tried to talk to the foreign office. And of course, the foreign office says it’s got nothing to do with us, you need to talk to the home office. And the home office said it’s got nothing to do with us because we don’t acknowledge any of that.

Strauss: With Sealand, the courts decided that Sealand was outside of British jurisdiction. It was a rather low court and the government could have easily appealed it. But by that point the tabloids had gotten ahold of it, and the government was going to be made a laughingstock, and they reacted the same way as Australia and just ignored it.

STF: Erwin, I don’t know how much of a chance you’ve had to visit some of these countries. Was the film eye-opening to you in the ability to vicariously travel to some of these places?

Strauss: Yes, I hadn’t been to any of these countries, so it was interesting to actually see things I had researched in the library and written about. And here they are, living, breathing people out there doing things.

Audience: There was a riot in Australia a few years back where people hadn’t paid their taxes, and then barricaded their land and declared independence. The federal government arrested the farmer, who wrote a letter to the United Nations saying his country had been invaded, and could the Security Council do something about it. His pleas were ignored and the guy is in jail.

Strauss: I’m not familiar with that situation. I think because Prince Leonard is not actively farming, and because he has various legal angles, that’s why he doesn’t pay any taxes. Not because they think he doesn’t live in Australia anymore. As I’ve said, as far as farming goes, he’s semi-retired and probably lives off of savings, and probably has very little taxable income to report.

Audience: Have you renounced your U.S. citizenship? And if you do, who takes you then?

Green: No, I haven’t. But I will say about the previous question about the FBI, I have a massive FBI file, but it’s not because of the micronation.

Strauss: As for the legal implication, you go to any embassy or consulate of the U.S. and declare that you are no longer legally a citizen. Where you go after that, that’s your problem from then on. There was one famous case—the Dart family which made its fortune making foam cups. He cut a deal with Costa Rica, officially renounced his citizenship, became a citizen of Costa Rica and was appointed the consul of Costa Rica in Orlando, which is where he lived. There he was, living in the U.S. and not a U.S. citizen or subject to U.S. taxes. This lasted until somebody in the State Department got wind of it and declared him persona non grata as the consul of Costa Rica. Usually the U.S. is pretty lenient about letting people become Americans again, you’ve got to give them credit for that. When I was working on this gambling ship project, the question of whether I might need to do that arose if the U.S. started to crack down. Costa Rica is known as a very friendly country for that sort of thing. For a few dollars more they’ll give you a passport and citizenship, they’re not particularly picky about it.

[Q&A is edited for length and clarity]