Redacted
September 28th, 2007
More than with any film I’ve seen at the New York Film Festival so far, I’ve been struggling to find a way to talk about Brian De Palma’s Redacted, a movie that attempts to recreate the appalling images which have been systematically removed from the “news” about Iraq. The devastating reconstruction of the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl by American soldiers in Samarra in 2006, told entirely through “found” footage, the film felt like a well-aimed punch to the gut — or perhaps a stab in the heart. Whether blunt or sharp, the film’s impact is impossible to dismiss. Even though I thought I was handling the brutalities on screen well (usually by leaning over to scribble something in my notebook), I found myself unable to get up once the final credits started to roll; it had become physically impossible to move. Redacted sent me reeling.
Redacted. Brian De Palma, 2007. ****
September 28th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
[…] Redacted […]
September 29th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
De Palma stareted his career with some formalist-shattering radical left position paper films. Get your hands on “Hi, Mom.” If you haven’t seen it, you’ll go absolutely ape shit for it.
I’m very much looking forward (if that is the right way to phrase it) to Redacted.