ITALY: "Rendition", starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Reese Witherspoon hopes to shine light on CIA torture

Director Gavin Hood hopes his film about the U.S. practice of deporting suspected terrorists to foreign jails will raise public scrutiny and help stop human rights abuses in the name of national security. "Rendition", starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Reese Witherspoon, tells the fictional story of an Egyptian-American engineer abducted by U.S. customs at Washington airport, deported to a North African jail and tortured under the eyes of a CIA agent. Witherspoon plays the man's pregnant wife desperately trying to track him down, while Gyllenhaal is the reluctant CIA agent asked to supervise his brutal interrogation. The film, which screened at the Rome festival on Sunday (October 21) and has just been released in the United States, is the latest in a string of Hollywood productions tackling the political and military fallout from the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The theme has made U.S. cinema popular at European festivals this year, even though box office returns have been mixed. Striving for balance, the film poses the question of whether potentially saving the lives of thousands makes it worth sacrificing one person's rights. For actor Gyllenhaal, "Rendition" asks the uncomfortable question - can violence be justified? "I think that non-violence is the more appropriate choice in almost every situation, but I also know that politically there are very complicated situations that I couldn't even, that I don't have the audacity to say that I would understand or no. So, and this movie in particular presents both those levels and I think says that torture is wrong. I think you can see in the film that it does not work, but I also think it presents the political side of it too which is saying that you could be torturing one innocent man but at the same time five thousand people are alive," Gyllenhaal said. Witherspoon says she hopes her role is able to reveal the human side of most news headlines. "I see so many stories in the news and on television that I feel desensitized to the human element. And I felt that this film really explored the emotional reverberations of this practice in all the families in all the communities that this touches," said the Academy Award winner. Unlike other directors who have accused the media of not telling the full story about the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, Hood said the press had played a crucial role in bringing the practice of renditions to light and help shape public opinion on the issue. Hood hopes his film will help broaden the debate. "You know it's to talk about arbitrary detention and enhanced interrogation techniques and all these fancy words in the abstract and we realize that in fact it's about people not just the people to whom it happens but the people who are involved in having to do this and they don-t quite know what the rules are and so I hop that the film puts and human face to these otherwise abstract ideas and yes broadens the debate," said the South African director, whose previous film "Tsotsi" won an Oscar for best foreign movie last year. The United States acknowledges it has conducted secret international transfers of terrorist suspects and held them at secret prisons, but it denies torturing them or handing them over to countries that torture. It has sought to dismiss legal cases brought by victims on the grounds that they would violate state secrets. On the red carpet, both Gyllenhaal and Witherspoon said they hoped that, at the very least, "Rendition" will raise people's awareness on the practice of torture. "Whether or not they see this movie, what's interesting is I think people know now rendition , this movie is about torture, and that word is associated with that. And for the American and the world public, that's what's important to me," said Gyllenhaal. "Hopefully a film like this will get people talking," said Witherspoon.

ITN Source | October 25, 2007

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