Redacted: 90 minutes. Rated: MA. Director: Brian De Palma. Starring: Izzy Diaz, Patrick Carroll, Rob Devaney, Daniel Stewart Sherman, Zahra Zubaidi
'Truth is the first casualty of war.' So reads the tagline, and thematic banner, for American writer/director Brian De Palma's filmic thesis on misconduct and amorality among US Army soldiers in Iraq.
Ironically, the film itself, a based-on-fact account of the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, and the murder of her family, by a wayward group of US troops, plays pretty fast and loose with the truth.
The central perspective is that of Angel 'Sally' Salazar (Diaz), who hopes that the unflinching, fly-on-the-wall footage of his time helping to man a US military checkpoint outside of Baghdad will get him into film school.
When his comrades, the violent and disturbed Reno Flake (Carroll), obnoxious and aggressive Rush (Sherman), and conscientious but impressionable McCoy (Devaney), set out to rape young local girl Farah (Zubaidi), he accompanies them in the naïve belief that his hidden camera will capture just the kind of confronting slice of reality that he's after.
During the course of the crime, the horror of the event awakens an awareness of a photojournalistic ethical quandary: that to film horrors requires refraining from intervening to prevent them.
Needless to say, it's a pivotal moment for Sally. But this is not his story, it is De Palma's. As George Romero did in Diary of the Dead, De Palma utilises a variety of visual styles to replicate assorted 'live' video sources — Sally's video diary, an artsy documentary, CCTV footage, webcam confessionals and other forms of guerilla footage.
He pieces these together in order to support his critique of the misconduct of troops in Iraq (links are drawn between Al-Mahmudiyah and Abu Ghraib), and the tendency of the mass media and military to whitewash rather than confront these issues.
The title is a clue. To redact is to revise or edit into a literary form. So although Redacted takes its grim inspiration from a real-life atrocity, the 2006 Al-Mahmudiyah killings, that fact has been placed in a frame of fiction. Disclaimers at the start of the film make that clear. The truth has been revised and edited to carry the filmmaker's vision.
De Palma has been called a left-wing propagandist, and even treasonous, by some who take umbrage at his seemingly free and easy use of facts for