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Capsule review: ‘Bulletproof Salesman’
The third doc building on footage gathered by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein (“Gunner Palace”) at the start of the Iraq war, “Salesman” follows a single man, Fidelis Cloer, who’s part of the enormous commercial ecosystem of combat: His company takes commercially available automobiles and turns them into gunfire-resistant tanks, then sells them to diplomats, sheiks and other people with good reason to fear for their lives. We follow him first on cold-call sales trips to meet clients in hotspots such as Baghdad (though we never get to see an actual sales pitch), then watch as Cloer refines his product — reinforcing their undersides, for instance — as the nature of risk in Iraq shifts from bullets to improvised explosive devices. It’s a short portrait that never quite communicates the broader significance the filmmakers say they see in the subject, but it intrigues nevertheless.
6:30 p.m. Monday, 7:15 p.m. Thursday at the Austin Convention Center
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