Iraq War
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Michael Connors, Allegiance
An intelligently written and genuinely felt Iraq War drama, Allegiance is perhaps the first film about the way the conflict shaped the lives of those who prepare to go to battle that has been written, produced, directed and mostly financed by veterans themselves. The directorial debut of Michael Connors, the picture has an unforced verisimilitude few films about military life can match. Allegiance portrays an insular community with its own moral logic, in this case an American military regiment of New York National Guardsmen being called up to active duty in Iraq on the eve of the Sadr City/Fallujah nightmare of 2004. What […]
by Brandon Harris on Dec 12, 2012 -
OUR WAR AND PAT DOLLARD’S
How did I miss this article that came out in 2007? Conor Friedersdorf, filling in for Andrew Sullivan at his blog, linked to an old Vanity Fair article today as an example of “Slow” (i.e. long) journalism he especially likes. I read the piece over dinner. Normally when I read an article that I think will be of interest to Filmmaker readers, I’ll offer a quick summary and then excerpt a couple of particularly interesting paragraphs that capture the flavor of the piece. When it comes to “Pat Dollard’s War on Hollywood,” by Evan Wright in the March, 2007 Vanity […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 17, 2010 -
“COLLATERAL MURDER”
I of course had read about the U.S. military video decrypted and released by WikiLeaks documenting a helicopter attack that killed two Reuters journalists as well as a number of other people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad, but I hadn’t watched it until tonight. Titled “Collateral Murder,” it is available in a 17-minute edited and titled version and then the unedited 38-minute tape. From the “Collateral Murder” page: Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 8, 2010 -
INDIE FILMMAKING, IRAQ STYLE
Anybody else check out the ABC News Nightline tonight? I’m watching as I’m blogging here about Ted Koppel’s interview with Cyrus Kar, an American documentary filmmaker who was held in an American detention center in Iraq for 55 days after the cab he was riding in was pulled over. When U.S. soldiers found a collection of washing machine timers in the cab’s trunk, suddenly his camera equipment, microphone wires and the cab driver’s timers all seemed elements of potential Improvised Explosive Devices. Kar was held briefly at Abu Ghuraib before being transferred to a prison near the airport that also […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 24, 2005
