VENICE, Italy (AFP)
The Venice International Film Festival saw the Iraq war on the center stage for the second day running on Saturday, with two films inspired by true events depicting a dramatic and raw account of the outcomes of the U.S.-led invasion.
"Redacted" which was screened on Friday is Brian De Palma's dramatization laying out the shocking facts of a rape and multiple murders in Iraq, while Saturday's screening was Paul Haggis' film "In the Valley of Elah," based on the toll the conflict takes on returning U.S. soldiers.
De Palma's "Redacted" centers on the actual March 2006 rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi schoolgirl by U.S. soldiers, who also slaughtered her family members.
The film hits hard with its dramatic reenactment of the conditions, attitudes and stresses that led up to the real-life crime that saw Private First Class Jesse Spielman sentenced in early August to 110 years in prison.
Shown through the imaginary video lens of one of the soldiers involved in the raid on the girl's home in Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, De Palma's dramatization is interlaced with actual news clips, documentary footage and stills from the war.
The decision to use the device of the video cam arose from De Palma's research on the Internet. "The blogs, the use of language, it's all there," he said.
De Palma said he was "forced to fictionalize things" to get the movie made because of the legal obstacles to showing real people and events.
In Haggis' film Hollywood actors Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon play the parents of a soldier who goes missing shortly after returning from Iraq.
The father's search for their son, aided by a feisty police detective played by actress Charlize Theron, turns into a murder mystery that slowly uncovers hard truths about the Iraq war and its traumatizing effects on U.S. soldiers.
In discovering the brutality of which his son was capable, among many other disturbing revelations, Jones' character Hank Deerfield, a former military MP, has to upturn long-held beliefs. |
