Brian DePalma discusses his new film about the Iraq war, Redacted.
From Phil Nugent's intro:
The film takes off from an actual atrocity
committed by U.S. soldiers in March of 2006: in the town of
Al-Mahmudiyah, a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl was raped and killed by
five soldiers, who also murdered her parents and her five-year-old
sister. The incident recalls the case of a Vietnamese
woman whose rape at the hands of American soldiers during the Vietnam
war served as the basis for De Palma's 1989 Casualties of War, a movie he struggled for years to finance.
Seeing history repeat itself, De Palma decided to tap into his
long-standing obsession with the filter of media and tell a story about
soldiers in Iraq, driven psychotic by endlessly extended tours of duty,
using his own mock-media syntax. The action of the film is seen through
the camera of a soldier making his own video diary of his time in Iraq,
through the footage of a French documentary crew, through various blog
entries and YouTube postings, and even through security-camera feed.
