Released in 2020, Feels Good Man is a feature-length documentary about Matt Furie’s fight to reclaim Pepe from political extremists. Directed by Arthur Jones, it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Special Jury Prize for Emerging Filmmaker. The film tells the story of how a sweet cartoon frog became a global meme, then a hate symbol, then the subject of a one-man legal and creative campaign to take him back.
The documentary humanized both Pepe and Furie. Audiences who had only known Pepe as a controversial internet symbol learned about the gentle artist behind him. Furie became a sympathetic figure — a man fighting for his creation against forces beyond his control. Feels Good Man remains the definitive document of how Pepe lost and partially regained his innocence, and the most important film ever made about meme culture.
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