war on terror Tagged Articles at Cinematical

One of the toughest films I've sat through in recent memory wasn't at a film festival (though, to be sure, you can always find some good downers at a fest), it was a screener of James Gandolfini's first project since The Sopranos, a documentary for HBO called Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq. Disconcerting though it was to see Tony Soprano being warm and fuzzy, that wasn't the tough part to get through; the hard part was watching ten young men and women who, while serving in the armed forces in Iraq, nearly died there. All of them have been scarred in one way or another by their near-death experiences in Iraq.

The format is pretty simple: take a group of battle-scarred soldiers, sit them down one-by-one with Gandolfini on a sparse set hung with black velvet curtains, and let their stories speak for themselves. The soldiers' stories are interspersed with footage -- some of it, we're told at the beginning, taken by insurgents -- of the events that caused their injuries. It's not pretty; actually, it's pretty damn horrifying to watch a truck or tank driving down the road, see it get blown up, and know there are people inside, someone's sons and daughters. It's pretty damn horrifying, too, to see an arm or leg or head or torso all mangled and bloody, to see men and women crying in pain.

It's horrifying, too, to see a solidier, strong and active, intelligence shining out of his eyes, in home video and then to see that same solidier now, in a wheelchair, living with the effects of a traumatic brain injury caused by two bullets to his head. It's hard to hear the slight tremor underlying his mother's voice as she talks optimistically about the hope that her son will walk again, to see the pain in her eyes when he sings "From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli ... " with all the exuberance of a small child. She is happy to have her son still alive, no doubt, and proud of his service to the Marine Corps, but this is what her son is now, and the likelihood that he will ever again be the man he was before Iraq is slim.

There's an infamous essay about David Cronenberg's first film, Shivers, which was financed in part by Canadian tax dollars: "You Should Know How Bad This Film Is; After All, You Helped Pay For It." A paraphrase of that title rang in my mind as I watched the Sundance documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib: We should know how bad this situation is; after all, we've all helped pay for it. Director Rory Kennedy combines interviews, photos and on-site footage from Iraq's infamous prison -- which went from being Saddam Hussein's execution factory to being the site of an American scandal -- to make a potent piece of documentary filmmaking that demonstrates a clear chain of lawless, inhuman cruelty and corruption that went from the gleaming conference tables of the Oval Office and Pentagon to the blood-spattered, shit-smeared halls of a prison in Iraq.

Kennedy's methodology is meticulous and human -- many of the ex-service people who served time for the documented prisoner abuses captured in the infamous photographs speak on-camera about what they did, and why; several Iraqis are interviewed as well. Soldiers talk about how superior officers gave them minimal or conflicting guidance on how much pressure was too much pressure to induce captives to talk; ex-captives of Abu Ghraib talk about how, for example, they watched as their father was beaten so severely it lead to respiratory illness, which led to death -- with medical attention denied every time it was begged for by a weeping son.

Shadow of Afghanistan should be required viewing for all Americans. It should be shown in schools or, better yet, somehow as compulsory television to get the non-students, too. Okay, so mandating programs is not the way we do things in the United States; conservative influence would never allow something so easily deemed anti-war propaganda into most of our school districts. But the documentary, from Oscar-nominated filmmakers Jim Burroughs and Suzanne Bauman, is not merely something to suggest seeing; it is one of those films that mostly benefits those viewers with no interest in it, who would never consider such a suggestion.

An exhaustive look at the last fifty years in Afghan history, the film is vital primarily for its information, which I'm sure could easily be learned in a book about the country. Of course, movies are not only capable of attracting more people to any subject; their visual format often illustrates points more comprehensibly for people as well. A textbook could tell me how Afghanistan was very prosperous in the 1950s and '60s, but I am better able to absorb this concept and its significance by seeing footage of the country during that time, and by hearing stories from individuals affected by its subsequent economic change. The same heightened understanding can be applied to the Soviet invasion, the exile of refugees, the civil war, the rule of the Taliban, and finally the U.S. invasion.