Director: Brian De Palma
Cast: Patrick Carroll, Rob Devaney, Izzy Diaz, Daniel Stewart Sherman
This is a painfully frank depiction of the events before, during, and after the gang rape of a teenage girl in Iraq by US soldiers. Although plates at the beginning and end of the film insist that this is a fiction, it is clearly based on the Mahmudiyah killings.
The film’s style has been heavily criticized by some, but I thought it worked. It is set up as a documentary pieced together from different sources: US soldier Angel Salazar’s (Diaz) private video that he hopes to use for entry into film school; an Arab news network; an insurgents’ website; a French couple making their own documentary on road-blocks; an embedded journalist; an American anti-war website. These various sources give us a feeling not of objectivity, but of the range of propagandist subjectivities, underlining the tagline that “Truth is the first casualty of war”.
Sunk in the US by a meagre release schedule (only fifteen cinemas nationwide), IMDB lists no Australian release date for this film, but I’m hopeful it will make it there. It’s a brutal piece of film-making that has the audacity to attack not just the administration, but also the sacred cow of the troops themselves.
Yes, it’s clear that the soldiers have been placed in an impossible situation: they don’t know who the enemy is; they are exhausted by too-long tours and the endless promises that they’ll be sent home ‘tomorrow’. They, too, are the victims of the rules of engagement that have seen 2000 Iraqi civilians killed at checkpoints.
And while some of these soldiers are decent men, others are the kind of mindless bigots that you would expect to populate the ranks of an army that feeds on the unfortunate refuse of its society. They believe they’re there to take revenge for 9/11; they can’t see the humanity of the ‘sand-niggers’; they act accordingly, and show no remorse for doing so.
An inferior film, no doubt, to Battle for Haditha, but another important voice in the truth-denying clamour surrounding Iraq.
This is a painfully frank depiction of the events before, during, and after the gang rape of a teenage girl in Iraq by US soldiers. Although plates at the beginning and end of the film insist that this is a fiction, it is clearly based on the Mahmudiyah killings.The film’s style has been heavily criticized by some, but I thought it worked. It is set up as a documentary pieced together from different sources: US soldier Angel Salazar’s (Diaz) private video that he hopes to use for entry into film school; an Arab news network; an insurgents’ website; a French couple making their own documentary on road-blocks; an embedded journalist; an American anti-war website. These various sources give us a feeling not of objectivity, but of the range of propagandist subjectivities, underlining the tagline that “Truth is the first casualty of war”.
Sunk in the US by a meagre release schedule (only fifteen cinemas nationwide), IMDB lists no Australian release date for this film, but I’m hopeful it will make it there. It’s a brutal piece of film-making that has the audacity to attack not just the administration, but also the sacred cow of the troops themselves.
Yes, it’s clear that the soldiers have been placed in an impossible situation: they don’t know who the enemy is; they are exhausted by too-long tours and the endless promises that they’ll be sent home ‘tomorrow’. They, too, are the victims of the rules of engagement that have seen 2000 Iraqi civilians killed at checkpoints.
And while some of these soldiers are decent men, others are the kind of mindless bigots that you would expect to populate the ranks of an army that feeds on the unfortunate refuse of its society. They believe they’re there to take revenge for 9/11; they can’t see the humanity of the ‘sand-niggers’; they act accordingly, and show no remorse for doing so.
An inferior film, no doubt, to Battle for Haditha, but another important voice in the truth-denying clamour surrounding Iraq.
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