ITALY: Venice film festival turns its attention to the war in Iraq

In two new films presented at the Venice film festival, Hollywood turns the spotlight on the war in Iraq and its consequences. Director Brian De Palma on Friday (August 31) arrived at the premiere of his latest movie 'Redacted' at the Venice film festival. Redacted tells the story of the real-life rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers who also murdered her family. It is one of at least eight American films on the war in Iraq due for release in the next few months and the first of two movies on the conflict screening in Venice's main competition. Inspired by one of the most serious crimes committed by American soldiers in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, it is a harrowing indictment of the conflict and spares the audience no brutality to get its message across. De Palma, 66, whose "Casualties of War" in 1989 told a similar tale of abuse by American soldiers in Vietnam, makes no secret of the goal he is hoping to achieve with the film's images, all based on real material he found on the Internet. "And I think people that see the film are very disturbed by it and that's what is the beginning of a very vocal protest that you have to be able to see what your occupation is doing and the tragedy of this war is you have not been able to put those pictures on the screen," De Palma said in an interview for Reuters on Saturday (September 1). Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi was gang raped, killed and burnt by American soldiers in Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, in March 2006. Her parents and younger daughter were also killed. Five soldiers have since been charged with the attack. Four of them have been given sentences of between 5 and 110 years. Halfway between documentary and fiction, "Redacted" draws on soldiers' home-made war videos, blogs and journals and footage posted on YouTube, reflecting changes in the way the media cover the war. "I think that as an American you can be nothing but angry and upset at the way we have proceeded with in our foreign policy in the last six or seven years and the chaos we have created in the Mideast. And to not be affected by that is kind of amazing to me," De Palma told Reuters. The film's title refers to how, according to De Palma, mainstream American newspapers and television channels are failing to tell the true story of the war by keeping the most graphic images of the conflict away from public opinion. "I am very angry because you know, I think that is an important issue and I think the fourth estate has let us down, terribly, " De Palma said. The film, shot in Jordan with a little known cast,with a series of photographs of Iraqi civilians killed and their faces blacked out for legal reasons. Distributor Magnolia has planned a limited U.S. release for later this year, and the film may be easier to sell to European audiences rather than to the American public. A day after the "Redacted" premiere, Paul Haggis' "In the Valley of Elah" opened at the festival, with a more nuanced, yet moving account of the brutality some soldiers bring back to the United States. "In the valley of Elah", starring Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron, tells the story of a man whose son is murdered after returning from Iraq. As he pieces together what happened, the Vietnam war veteran begins to question his faith in his country and its policies. One of the defining images of the film is the American flag flying upside down, a sign of a nation in distress. Haggis said on Saturday he had tried not to allow his personal opinion about the war in Iraq to influence "Elah" too heavily. "This is the truth of what's happening. These are the hard things we have to face and we had to face them together, I am as guilty as the next person and it doesn't really matter if I was against the war or for the war this is what's happening right now and we better open our eyes to these concerns and deal with it and these and that's why the very first thing we did was start to screen this for the veterans of the Iraq war campaign and for Afghanistan marines and soldiers," Haggis said. The film is inspired by the true story of a soldier whose father investigates his mysterious death near his army base in the United States in 2003. He learns his son was stabbed to death by comrades, two of whom were convicted of the murder. Jones plays the taciturn Hank Deerfield, who downloads images from his dead son's mobile phone that offer grainy glimpses of what he went through in Iraq, and reveal that Mike was not the model soldier his father believed him to be. Jones, 60, was not in Venice because he was undergoing eye surgery, according to Haggis. Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon play a local detective and Mike's mother respectively. Haggis, whose 2005 film "Crash" won an Oscar for best picture, said this was partly because journalists were failing. "During the Vietnam war we had terrific journalists doing their job, reporting on things that we didn't want to hear and we were reading about it in the newspapers, were seeing it on television - all the unpleasant truths. Now we don't have that. I don't know why we don't have that you can answer that better than I but I think that when that doesn't happen then it is the responsibility of the artist to answer those difficult questions."

ITN Source | September 5, 2007

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