Redacted

[MacGuffin]

HDNet, De Palma team for 'Redacted'
Director to write project on Iraq war
Source: Variety

Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban's HDNet Films has tapped Brian De Palma to write and direct "Redacted," a feature about the Iraq war.

Project will begin lensing in the spring in Jordan.

Magnolia Pictures will release the pic day-and-date next fall in theaters (which will include Landmark outlets and others), via HDNet on TV and through Magnolia Home Entertainment for video.

The film will be a montage of stories about U.S. soldiers fighting in the conflict.

"Redacted" will focus on the modern forms of media covering the war. Blogs, Web reporting and other aspects unique to the conflict will be featured heavily, producers said.

No cast has yet been attached. Project will be shot in high-def.

Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente of HDNet Films will produce along with the Film Farm's Simone Urdl and Jennifer Weiss.

Despite a distribution plan similar to that of Steven Soderbergh's "Bubble" -- the first HDNet Films day-and-date experiment, last year-- Kliot said the company expected a wider release and more commercial resonance because of the relevance of the topic.

HDNet films most recently produced Sundance pics "Fay Grim" and "Broken English."

De Palma and HDNet came together because of the company's ability to move projects forward quickly. "We're able to do this because we don't have a studio apparatus," Kliot said. "That's very important with a subject that's in the news and changes so quickly."

[MacGuffin]

'Redacted' stuns Venice
Brian De Palma's film about the rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers leaves festival-goers in tears.
Source: Reuters

VENICE -- A new film about the real-life rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers who also murdered her family stunned the Venice festival, with shocking images that left some viewers in tears.

"Redacted", by U.S. director Brian De Palma, 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.

"The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people," he told reporters after a press screening.

"The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to motivate their Congressmen to vote against this war," he said.

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.

"IT'S ALL ON THE INTERNET"

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.

"In Vietnam, when we saw the images and the sorrow of the people we were traumatizing and killing, we saw the soldiers wounded and brought back in body bags. We see none of that in this war," De Palma said.

"It's all out there on the Internet, you can find it if you look for it, but it's not in the major media. The media is now really part of the corporate establishment," he said.

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.

"When I went out to find the pictures, I said (to the media) give me the pictures you can't publish," he said, adding that because of legal dangers he too had to "edit" the material.

"Everything that is in the movie is based on something I found that actually happened. But once I had put it in the script I would get a note from a lawyer saying you can't use that because it's real and we may get sued," De Palma said.

"So I was forced to fictionalize things that were actually real."

The film, shot in Jordan with a little known cast, ends with a series of photographs of Iraqi civilians killed and their faces blacked out for legal reasons.

"I think that's terrible because now we have not even given the dignity of faces to this suffering people," De Palma said.

"The great irony about Redacted is that it was redacted."

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.

"This is a harrowing experience you put the audience through. It is not something you want to go to on a delightful Saturday evening but this message must be put forward and hopefully the public will respond," De Palma said.

[MacGuffin]

Trailer

Release date: Nov. 30, 2007

Starring: Patrick Carroll, Paul O'Brien, Daniel Stewart Sherman, Kel O'Neill, Rob Devaney

Directed by: Brian De Palma

Premise: A montage of stories about U.S. soldiers fighting in the Iraq conflict, focusing on the modern forms of media covering the war.

[MacGuffin]

De Palma goes to war over Iraq movie

Director Brian De Palma is fighting battles on two fronts for his gritty Iraq war movie "Redacted," blasting the film's distributor and taking incoming fire from right-wing pundits.

He told a New York Film Festival audience late Wednesday that Magnolia Pictures forced him to black out the faces in a montage of real photos that runs at the end of the film.

"The irony of all this is that even though everyone (in Iraq) has a digital camera and access to the Internet, somehow we don't see any of these images," De Palma said. "Why are things being redacted? My own film was redacted."

The graphic photos depict victims of the war; with the black magic-marker etchings across their faces, though, the faces are now difficult if not impossible to recognize. Magnolia executives have said that it's impossible to get legal releases for the photos, while company owner Mark Cuban has been quoted as saying he found the unredacted images problematic.

While Magnolia probably is one of the few major indie distributors that would release the provocative war movie -- which depicts fictional soldiers raping an Iraq teenager and killing her family -- the director has said he felt misled because Magnolia originally told him he could use the photos unredacted.

The dispute is likely to further stoke the movie's critics, particularly on the right. Comments about the movie by De Palma -- already a whipping boy for what conservative pundits say is a radical agenda -- prompted Fox News on Thursday to cover the story as "far-left infighting," with Bill O'Reilly calling De Palma "a true villain in our country" and saying the movie could lead to deaths of U.S. troops.

O'Reilly suggested that no one would see the film, though an enthusiastic response at the New York Film Festival screening -- and the continued glare from right-wing media -- likely would raise curiosity levels and possibly ticket sales.

"Redacted," which was shot in Jordan with real soldiers and actors, will be released next month.

The comments cap several tense days at the movie's major-media debut. On Monday, after the director complained about the decision on the photos at a NYFF news conference, Magnolia president Eamonn Bowles and Jason Kliot, one of the film's producers, each stood up from the audience to disagree.

Bowles countered the charge that Magnolia was taking the easy way out when he asked De Palma in front of reporters, "Who else would make this movie?"

But De Palma remains outspoken. Commenting generally about passages being redacted from military documents, De Palma said Wednesday: "One starts to wonder why is this happening. Is someone trying to stop us from seeing this?" he asked. "It's all on YouTube."

[I Don't Believe in Beatles]

the video of DePalma arguing with Bowles.

[MacGuffin]

Director De Palma disturbed over Iraq film edit

Veteran Hollywood director Brian De Palma has lashed out at what he calls the censorship of his new film about Iraq and the chilling effect of corporate America on the war.

De Palma's film, "Redacted," is based on the true story of a group of U.S. soldiers who raped and killed a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and murdered members of her family. It has stunned audiences for its shocking images and rattled American conservative commentators before its U.S. opening next month.

But De Palma says he is upset that the documentary-style drama -- its name derived from his view that news coverage of the war has been incomplete -- has been censored.

The film's distributor, Magnolia Pictures, ordered the faces of dead Iraqis shown in a montage of photographs at the end of the film be blacked out.

"I find it remarkable. 'Redacted' got redacted. I mean, how ironic," De Palma, who made his name directing violent films like "Scarface" and "The Untouchables," said in an interview. "I fought every way I could in order to stop those photographs from being redacted and I still lost."

De Palma has loudly argued the issue in public, including sparring with Eamonn Bowles, the president of Magnolia, during a recent forum at the New York Film Festival. Bowles countered that possible future lawsuits by the families of the dead Iraqis meant the photos had to be edited.

Bowles said Magnolia had been put in "an untenable legal position," and that De Palma lost rights to the film's final cut in recent arbitration with the Directors Guild of America.

"We were always open about letting him make the sort of film he wanted to make," Bowles said in an interview, adding not many distribution companies would have supported the film at all.

CORPORATE POWER

De Palma, who has criticized Hollywood for not being willing to finance such independent films, said he was shocked at his own lack of editorial control.

"I can't even get the photographs out there, that was all surprising to me," he said. "What is going on here? These are war photographs. ... You see these and you go 'oh boy, this shouldn't be happening."'

The 67-year-old director said he blames "the insurance companies" for exercising too much control over film distribution. Bowles admitted Magnolia could not insure the film if it ran the unedited photos, which were too graphic to run in mainstream newspapers or television reports.

De Palma said he expected the images in "Redacted" to stir U.S. public debate about the conduct of American soldiers. Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi was gang-raped, killed and burned by U.S. troops in Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, in March 2006. Her parents and another family member were also killed.

He said the film provided a realistic portrait of U.S. troops and how "the presentation of our troops has been whitewashed" by mainstream media.

De Palma, who looked at the atrocities of conflict in the 1989 film "Casualties of War," which also centers on the rape of a young girl by U.S. soldiers, believes news coverage of wars had changed since the Vietnam War.

"We saw fallen soldiers, we saw suffering Vietnamese. We don't see any of that now," he said. "We see bombs go off, but where do they come down? Who do they hit?"

The U.S. invasion of Iraq was "clearly a mistake," he said, that was perpetuated by "defense contractors, big corporations of America" profiting from the war.

"How many billions of dollars are those companies making? And who gets more famous than ever? The media. There is nothing like a war to fill the airwaves 24 hours a day," he said.

[MacGuffin]

Brian De Palma Gets Redacted
Source: ComingSoon

On March 12, 2006, in the town of Al-Mahmudiyah just south of Baghdad, Five members of the 502nd US Infantry Regiment gang-raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and then murdered her and her family. Since the incident was revealed, three out of the five men have been court-martialed and sentenced, with a fourth pending trial in federal court.

Brimming with a sense of outrage, legendary director Brian De Palma (Carrie, Scarface, The Untouchables) set out to dramatize the incident, and the events leading up to and following it, using unknown actors and shot entirely in HD. The fictionalized treatment, titled Redacted, uses several innovative points-of-view to tell its story, including footage shot by one of the soldier characters on a camcorder, an alternate view shot by a fictional French documentary crew, security cameras, YouTube videos, and Al Jazeera news footage. All of this is pulled off in frighteningly realistic fashion, and brings a new energy into De Palma's work.

De Palma sat down in New York with us to comment on this controversial new project and the process of bringing it to life.

CS: On the cover of today's (10/10/07) New York Times there was a story of an incident nearly identical to the one that happens in your film, two Iraqi women getting shot in their car at a checkpoint. What are the considerations you need to make when you make a film about a current, ongoing, ever-evolving conflict?
Brian De Palma: You have to fictionalize it. All the stuff in the movie is inspired by real incidents, but as soon as I used the real incident a lawyer would come and say "You can't use that, it actually happened." It's just so bizarre, you can use it in newspapers, you can use it on the Internet, but if you put it in a movie you have to fictionalize it. So absolutely, the incident in the movie is based on an actual reported incident, and here it is again.

CS: At the end of the film you use real photographs of Iraqi war casualties, but the subjects faces have been blacked out or "redacted". Is that another case of legalities forcing you to change the content?
De Palma: Exactly. That caught me by surprise, 'cause they knew we were gonna use actual photographs right from the get-go. They gave us releases. All of the sudden we had to get subject releases, and you say "Well, these are war photographs... when you're in a war zone you don't run around getting people to sign releases." Which caught me a little off guard. If I'd known earlier I could have recreated some of the photos, like the last photo you see in the movie is a recreation. That's why I'm a little heated about it, 'cause I think I was misled. But that's their work in the film. I wanted you to see their work. The movie is called "Redacted" so let's see the redactors with their big black pens.

CS: What did you learn from making a film digitally?
De Palma: Fascinating, because of all these digital sources I found on the Internet. You know there was a site on the Internet called LEGOfest that illustrated the whole incident with LEGOs, the whole murder and killing with LEGOs. I said, "My God, this is so bizarre." And of course I couldn't use it because of copyright problems.

CS: Was there specific footage that soldiers shot on camcorders over there, as in the film, that you used as reference?
De Palma: No no no, we made all that stuff up. But the soldiers are really bored over there most of the time and they are walking around with video cameras, and you see this stuff in their postings and sometimes they're put together and used in documentaries. You can't use real stuff unless you get the rights.

CS: Is it hard to get the rights?
De Palma: Yes, it is difficult. The girl ranting about what should happen to these guys, that's an actual Blog that I dramatized and we bought the rights to. It's Wild Bill, that's his blog. That's one thing we were actually able to get the rights to.

CS: It seems like in some ways the war doesn't make these soldiers bad, these guys show up being profoundly messed up.
De Palma: Well, I wouldn't say that. What you want to show, much like "Casualties of War," is how guys go so off the rails like this. I'm very specific to say that these are bad apples, they address themselves as bad apple, I have a very long scene where they talk about "I'm a wild card." I studied a lot of these kind of crazy incidents, which go all the way back to the Yablonski murders. [Joseph Yablonski was a United Mine Workers of America union official who was murdered, along with his family, in a hit ordered by UMWA president W.A. Boyle] When they had to get the guys together to kill Yablonski they couldn't get the right group together until they found the one nutcase they put in, much like "In Cold Blood"... you've gotta find that one guy that's just a little tweaked, and he gets the other guys to go along with him. I was trying to be very even-handed on that 'cause that's been my experience basically, and it was certainly true of "Casualties of War". Same thing, where the sarge lost his best buddy and they just go crazy.

CS: When you were growing up did you do any military service?
De Palma: No, but my father was an orthopedic surgeon in World War II, he was on a hospital ship in the Pacific. That's another thing you see when you talk to soldiers: they can't talk about what they experienced. My father never said a word about it. It was interesting to see recently, Charlie Durning, who I starred as an actor in one of my early movies, you knew Charlie had something to do with the war, but we didn't realize he was on Omaha Beach! I mean, he had a couple Purple Hearts! Suddenly 50 years later Charlie started to talk about this. They don't want to talk about it, they can't convey it to someone who hadn't been there. You want to try to get that idea across, and that has a lot to do with those images at the end of the movie. These are the images. One of the more striking digital video movies I've seen is "Baghdad ER". I've been in an ER, my father was a surgeon. I've spent a lot of time in a big city hospital. I've seen those scenes, I've smelled those smells. You never forget that stuff, and that was very effective.

CS: How much of the actual incident did you include and how much was fictionalized?
De Palma: I'm kind of legally restricted because I can only say it was inspired by an incident. Now, you can go on the Internet and you can put in the keywords and the incident will come up and you'll find all the same information I did. But the characters are very much based on the characters in "Casualties of War." The difference a little bit in this war as opposed to Vietnam is they keep re-deploying them, there's no exit. Everybody talked about how short you were in Vietnam, you could at least go home after a year. That doesn't happen in Iraq, they keep re-deploying you, and that again brings up the frustration and anger. The other thing is who are they recruiting? The wild card in this case was a guy who would never normally be inducted into the army, and had all sorts of SEVERE psychological problems BEFORE the incident.

CS: Why this particular project at this particular time?
De Palma: Again, it was a sequence of events. I was at Toronto, I was having dinner with some friends, someone from HDNET said, "Are you interested in making a movie for $5 million dollars on High Definition?" I said, "Fine, if I can think of a way in which I can tell a story in video that made some sense." Then I read about the incident and said, "My God, this is 'Casualties of War' all over again." Then I went on the Internet to search for information about the incident and I came up with all these unique video ways to tell the stories, and it's like an exciting new form for me! It's a new way to deal with narrative.

Redacted opens in limited release this Friday, November 16.

[Jeremy Blackman]

Just saw this.

Short review

The movie is poorly acted and poorly edited, but it's extremely valuable, and exactly what people need to see right now.

Long review

Minor spoilers. (Nothing that would ruin the movie for you.)

Before I rip into the movie a bit, let me explain why I anticipated it so much, and why that was justified. We need to stop romanticizing our soldiers and what they do. They do not fight for our freedom. I will personally vomit on the next person who says that. They fight for other people's money and power. We all know this, but the idea that we send disposable human beings to do the dirty work is so indigestible that we like to swallow the readymade freedom-defender myth, the myth of glory, comaraderie, sacrifice. Everything good that a soldier does is in spite of his role as a soldier, not because of it. This film promised to be (and is, really) a manifestation of the argument I just made.

And a lot of it works. All the scenes which involve combat or conflict are very well-done, even novel. You do get a sense of the randomness of things, the contrast of boredom with instant tragedy. The kidnapping scene, probably the most cinematic thing in the whole movie, is just perfect. Even some of the security camera scenes work. But the rest of it... not so much. The acting is certainly B or C-grade, as I've heard many critics say, but I don't think that's the real problem. DePalma's faux-documentary conceit just falls apart. He basically just throws a bunch of fictional handheld "life of a soldier" footage at us and hopes it connects. I can seriously picture him cutting the film together in iMovie, putting the "bored soldiers looking at dirty magazines" clip here and the "brief moral insight after a moment of antics" clip there, pleased with himself that he's making something that will feel "real" simply because it was shot with a video camera and has a time stamp. The worst of the worst is the internet footage. The "just a soldier's wife" webpage, the father/son video iChat, the confession. Gawd. It does not work. And what was with the ranting hipster video Youtube thing? Just awful.

Anyone who's read or heard anything about this movie surely knows about the end sequence with the victim photos, that it was itself redacted, etc. Well, I have a separate criticism. Something about it made me really sick. Not the photos themselves--they weren't surprising or especially gory or anything, and I recognized most of them. It's done like an iMovie slideshow, where one picture smoothly dissolves to the next at a certain interval. This was very cold. Even colder was the dramatic orchestra music that was put over the slideshow. I hope to God this was not DePalma's decision, because it just feels so terribly wrong. They could have learned a lot from Michael Moore's "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" sequence from BFC, or even Lars Von Trier's "Young American" sequence from Dogville.

And still, people should see this movie. Really.

[hedwig]

And what was with the ranting hipster video Youtube thing? Just awful.

oh god, brian de palma put a chris crocker in the movie?? fuck. well, i'm still gonna see this movie but i think i'll close my eyes during this part.

[MacGuffin]

Pretty much on it with JB. The film starts of beautifully and very powerful. The life of a soldier on the check points captured what happens in a day, all the monotony and adrenaline filled moments, in a very poetic manner. And it was also interesting to see all the video footage done from all the different points of view, making for a fitting docudrama. It made the film very 'now.' But once the incident happens, you can feel the story coming into play and that quickly shifts the film into a movie; which is to say that you then realize you are watching a movie instead of feeling like it was 'real' footage. The poor acting becomes aparent; and you can't help but think that DePalma has tackled the same subject with Casualites Of War.