Get out the popcorn. It's November.

Today, we look at a mockumentary. Audience warning: some of this material is extremely offensive. It's meant to be, as it's intended to make you laugh and think at the same time, always a dangerous combination. But first, a short subject.

Today's Short Subject: Joan Baez singing The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. This is just for context, y'all. Because I know you Brits can't keep the players straight in the US Civil War. Short version: in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president. This made everybody in the South mad, because Lincoln was from the new Republican Party, which at that time stood for progress, equal rights for all, and the abolition of slavery. (Yeah, that changed later.) South Carolina seceded from the Union, then 12 more states joined, declaring another country called the Confederate States of America.

'Wait a minute,' said the other states. 'You can't do that.'

'Oh, yeah?' said the Confederates. 'Just watch us.' Soon, war broke out. It lasted until April of 1865 and killed 600,000 people. Eventually, the Union won. The South was in ruins, which is what the song is about. (And yeah, they joked about saving their Confederate money for a hundred years.)

Most of the small farmers and such who were conscripted into the CSA army didn't have slaves. The war wasn't ideological to them, they either just went along, or were forced into it. But they suffered a lot from the war. Afterward, there was always the question: what if those slaveholding knotheads had won? What would the world have been like? People have written serious books on this subject.

Today's Feature Film is not one of them.

Today's Feature Film: Kevin Willmott's CSA: Confederate States of America is a mockumentary – a fake documentary. The premise is that the Confederacy won the war and survived into the 21st Century. There are Forrest Gump-like shots of rebel flags on the moon, etc. Parodies of Ken Burns' endless, dreary slideshow on the Civil War. All very droll.

What's not so droll is the picture the film paints of a world in which slavery is still openly practiced in the US, as opposed to the covert variety that sometimes happens still. And this is why the film is so interesting. You see, you may have trouble teasing apart the outrageous 'alternate history' jokes from the actual reality. The story about a defeated Lincoln fleeing the victorious Confederates is a parody of the hunt for Confederate president Jefferson Davis, etc. And some of those commercials and TV shows actually existed. Oh, and 'drapetomania' was a real word, coined by a racist scientist in 1851. Go figure.

And a lot of those attitudes did, too.

I think this is a valuable film, not only because it's clever, which it is, but because it enables the audience to become thoughtful about race relations. Not just in the US, people: stop and think about it. Anywhere on the planet, anytime you like to think of, any two or three or more kinds of people…doesn't this happen? Why does it happen? What can we do about it? Maybe one way to fight against the kind of self-serving lies humans tell, and the way they mistreat each other, is to poke fun at it. And hope the children get wise.

Oh, and although this film is blamed on the 'British Broadcasting Service', the BBC has nothing to do with it.