By George

A short documentary (in progress) about our first real moment of declaring independence 250 years ago, when New Yorkers toppled the statue of King George III in Battery Park after hearing a public reading of the freshly inked document on July 9, 1776. What happened to the statue after that? The answer might surprise you. Made of iron, it got melted down by a Connecticut girl into artillery balls to kill the enemy. Its base became a gravestone and then the doorstep to a New Jersey kitchen. Its decapitated head got smuggled back to England, probably hiding to this day in a colonist’s estate. In this film, we draw parallels with the rise and fall of the Roman empire, and the timeless practice to topple statues signalling regime change, from ancient emperors to dictators like Hussein and Assad, and removal of Confederate statues and slave owners as society evolves. We follow historian Abby Suckle on her trail to finally find the missing head of King George III, telling the whole story of how it happened, along with reflections from Ivan Schwartz whose Studio EIS in Brooklyn has spent decades creating statues of legends from American history in all its complexity: from official statues at Presidential libraries, to a recreation of the toppled statue of King George III at the Museum of the American Revolution.