“Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe,” a controversial new documentary alleging that vaccinations may cause autism, has found a new home after it was cut from the slate of films screening at the Tribeca Film Festival by its founder, actor Robert De Niro.
De Niro’s decision was both applauded by pro-vaccine groups and castigated by others. And according to the actor, the decision did not come easily. The 72-year-old film icon and his wife Grace Hightower have an autistic child, but ultimately the increasingly vocal criticism of the science backing up the film’s claims was too much for the “Raging Bull” star to bear.
“My intent in screening this film was to provide an opportunity for conversation around an issue that is deeply personal to me and my family,” De Niro said in a March 26 statement. “But after reviewing it over the past few days with the Tribeca Film Festival team and others from the scientific community, we do not believe it contributes to or furthers the discussion I had hoped for.”
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The film’s director and co-writer, Andrew Wakefield, vowed that his film would survive the snub — and it has. According to Variety, the film will now be released via Cinema Libre, which will premiere it this Friday at the Angelika Film Center in New York City. Apparently, there are no official distribution plans to follow, but Cinema Libre’s leadership clearly has no qualms with its content.
“We chose to distribute this film to correct a major issue, which is the suppression of medical data by a governmental agency that may very well be contributing to a significant health crisis,” Cinema Libre Chairman Philippe Diaz said in a statement. “The media storm of last week also revealed another issue; the hyper mediatization by some members of the media and the documentary community who had not even seen the film, as well as Tribeca executives, which condemned it as anti-vaccine.”
Diaz went on to argue that neither the film nor Wakefield himself is anti-vaccine. “Wakefield’s concern for the last twenty years has been about making sure that vaccines are safe for children,” he said. “This is why we decided to release the film now rather than as originally planned later in the year.”
Wakefield himself has argued that his film is being “censored in the United States of America” and that “it has become a First Amendment issue.”









