East Coast Premiere

When you sell vehicles that resist bombs and bullets, war is good for business. Yet even with the bullets flying, the cars won’t sell themselves. For that, you need a professional.

Enter Fidelis Cloer, an armored car salesman whose Iraqi customers place a premium on staying alive. He’s so confident about his merchandise that he sits calmly inside one of his cars while a prospective customer fires a machine gun at it.

While such stunts make for incredible footage, Cloer himself is the engine that drives BULLETPROOF SALESMAN, which was shot over five years by co-directors Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker. Cloer’s observations on daily violence, government mismanagement and the difficult ethics of his profession ring true with the clarity of a bell. And his fatalistic sense of humor lightens what would otherwise be an irretrievably bleak subject.

Cloer drolly declares himself a war profiteer, but he clearly feels the weight of his words, seeming to wonder what it means to make good money by selling safety in an unsafe land.

Epperlein and Tucker have made the film intentionally slick, allowing us to realize the magnitude of the risk and violence without striking us numb—in other words, helping us feel the way that Cloer himself feels. The technology of the cars is remarkable. The questions asked by the man who sells them are doubly so, and it’s a privilege to ride along while Cloer makes his pitch.

-D.B. Garland