Director: Nick Broomfield
Cast: a number of real US soldiers and Iraqis
Battle for Haditha is a documentary-style film that follows three groups of people: a squad of US soldiers, an Iraqi family, and a couple of Iraqi ex-soldiers who plant a roadside bomb.
It’s a fictionalized account of real events: on 19/11/05, a roadside bomb killed one marine and injured two more. In the ensuing hours, marines killed twenty-four Iraqis — men, women, and children — many (if not all) of whom were subsequently revealed to be civilians. There has been debate as to whether the massacre (sometimes tendentiously called ‘the Iraqi Mỹ Lai’) was conducted in accordance with USMC protocol or not. Trials are not yet complete.
The handheld camera and real personnel (recently returned US soldiers and Iraqi refugees) lend a painful realism to the picture. Of course, plenty of the details are guesswork. We know it can’t be documentary, but it feels awfully close.
The great strength of the film is its empathy for the three groups: it doesn’t merely demonize either the Americans or the insurgents, and won’t allow the kind of lazy, knee-jerk ethics that jingoism (“It’s tough for our boys over there!”) or the nightly news (“The US is an evil imperialist!”) encourage.
This is Broomfield in a new and very welcome mode. Some of the performances are truly breathtaking, but one can’t help imagining that in certain heartbreaking scenes, we have moved past ‘just acting’ into borderline exploitation. Elliot Ruiz (as Corporal Ramirez) is a standout, and it’s easy to imagine him finding more mainstream acting work.
The film is a little maudlin in parts, which breaks the vérité mood, but there is so much right here, and it’s such an important story to tell, that you have to overlook its minor flaws.
Battle for Haditha is a documentary-style film that follows three groups of people: a squad of US soldiers, an Iraqi family, and a couple of Iraqi ex-soldiers who plant a roadside bomb.It’s a fictionalized account of real events: on 19/11/05, a roadside bomb killed one marine and injured two more. In the ensuing hours, marines killed twenty-four Iraqis — men, women, and children — many (if not all) of whom were subsequently revealed to be civilians. There has been debate as to whether the massacre (sometimes tendentiously called ‘the Iraqi Mỹ Lai’) was conducted in accordance with USMC protocol or not. Trials are not yet complete.
The handheld camera and real personnel (recently returned US soldiers and Iraqi refugees) lend a painful realism to the picture. Of course, plenty of the details are guesswork. We know it can’t be documentary, but it feels awfully close.
The great strength of the film is its empathy for the three groups: it doesn’t merely demonize either the Americans or the insurgents, and won’t allow the kind of lazy, knee-jerk ethics that jingoism (“It’s tough for our boys over there!”) or the nightly news (“The US is an evil imperialist!”) encourage.
This is Broomfield in a new and very welcome mode. Some of the performances are truly breathtaking, but one can’t help imagining that in certain heartbreaking scenes, we have moved past ‘just acting’ into borderline exploitation. Elliot Ruiz (as Corporal Ramirez) is a standout, and it’s easy to imagine him finding more mainstream acting work.
The film is a little maudlin in parts, which breaks the vérité mood, but there is so much right here, and it’s such an important story to tell, that you have to overlook its minor flaws.
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