continued ................... The scenes in which she recounts the story of her son Michael's death have had cinema-goers sniffing into their sleeves. "For many years," says Lipscomb, "I thought I had to control everything. I had a real controlling spirit. But, boy, when the army stands in your house and tells you that your oldest son is killed, all that flies out the window. Over this last year and a half, I've been known to cry a bit." The power of Lipscomb's story lies in the sharpness of the U-turn she made and her eloquence in speaking about it. Initially, she supported the war, on the assumption that the government knew best. But just two weeks into the conflict her 26-year-old son, a sergeant in the US army, was shot down while serving as a door gunner in a Black Hawk helicopter. Five other soldiers died with him. A week or so later she received his last letter, in which he told her he thought Bush had lost the plot and that they shouldn't be in Iraq, that the whole thing was folly. Moore got wind of it when Lipscomb and her family were featured in Newsweek magazine and he flew to Flint, his hometown, for a meeting. "Michael Moore said he'd already been around America interviewing all different types of people [for the film]. It was the most incredible experience; he was sitting in our living room and all of a sudden, during the talking and sharing, a tear fell from his eye. His producer said afterwards, 'Michael found it, he found it, he found what the movie was going to be about!'" Lipscomb should by rights have been suspicious of Moore. She is a Democrat, but a conservative one. She is, or at least was, deeply conformist and even now if the draft was enforced, wouldn't urge desertion, because that would be breaking the law. "I instilled in my children, as it was instilled in me that, regardless of who is elected the president of the United States of America, it is the position that you honour. It doesn't matter if they are Republican or Democrat. Boy, what an awakening." She had seen Moore's first film, Roger and Me, a documentary about the devastating closure of Flint's General Motors plant, and been impressed. When he asked her to participate in Fahrenheit 9/11 she went away and watched his last film, Bowling for Columbine. This also, she thought, had merit. But she had other reasons for taking part; chiefly guilt, for not having spoken up sooner, for having, she says, been complacent and gullible enough to believe Bush's arguments for war. "The reason I didn't hesitate was because I was carrying my son's words with me. And as a mother I have to carry each and every day the fact, could I have done a little bit more? Could I have been more vocal so that the president would not have been given that much authority within himself? And nobody can make that go away. My son got sent into harm's way by a decision made by the president of the United States that was based on a lie. Would my son still be here today if I had had my uprising then?" The day Michael decided to join the army, she says, "I was so proud of him, so proud of him. It was the first grown-up, manly decision that he'd ever made in his life." She knew the risks - her daughter Jennifer served in the first Gulf war - but she also thought it a smart career move for people in their position, a low-income family. Then, over Christmas 2002, on his last home visit, Michael said something surprising. "I so vividly remember. I walked out of my bedroom and we have a long hallway upstairs and he was standing there and he said he would have to go to Kuwait and then to Baghdad. And he said he didn't support the war, that he didn't know why he had to go over there. We talked about fear. I was petrified, because in my mind I was thinking that's where Bin Laden is, because that's what we'd been told." She knows better now, she says, about the failure to find a connection between Bin Laden and Iraq, about the failure to prove the existence of weapons of mass destruction. Moore's film follows her to the White House, where she tries to have it out with someone, but is refused entry. Instead, she is berated by a passer-by who accuses her, as an antiwar campaigner, of "staging" many of the conflict's tragedies. "My son is dead," she says. "That is not staged." And her legs buckle under her.