War

GUANTANAMO A DIFFICULT IMPORT

There’s a good feature up at The Guardian by David Rose, the British journalist who was the first person to interview the “Tipton Three” following the release of these British Muslims from Guantanamo Bay. Now he’s writing about the film by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitcross, The Road to Guantanmo and discussing its chances of being released in the U.S: To date, says producer Andrew Eaton, the film is set to be shown in 18 countries. But as yet, although there have been expressions of interest, there is no distribution deal for the one nation where it most urgently needs […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 28, 2006
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
BRICK BY BRICK

I was on the international jury this year at Toronto’s Hot Docs, and one of the best and most original docs I saw there, Simone Bittan’s Wall, is receiving its U.S. premiere this Friday at the Quad in New York. Paris-based Bittan, who is both an Israeli and French citizen, was born in Morocco and considers herself an Arab Jew. Employing her hybrid identity as something of a structuring device, Wall documents the construction of the “security fence” that is separating Israel from Palestine, creating a portrait not only of a region divided but of a world in which the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 22, 2005
GET OUT OF THE VECTOR!

From an email from filmmaker Garrett Scott, who premiered his smart, sometimes surreal but always penetrating doc on a U.S. Army unit deployed in Fallujah, Occupation: Dreamland (pictured) in Rotterdam, where I got snagged in my hotel room with the Sundance flu for a couple of days: “It is widely believed that the deadly global Influenza epidemic of 1918 spread across the U.S. so rapidly because of mass troop mobilization for the First World War. No one realized what sort of by product would arise from moving all those bodies into closely compressed camps. Then, move them by train to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 8, 2005
PAIN, SUFFERING AND THE AMERICAN WAY

Producer, screenwriter and co-president of Focus Features James Schamus penned this sharp essay in In These Times on one short-term goal progressive citizens can rally around during their post-election blues: oppose the nomination of White House Legal Counsel Alberto Gonzales to the position of Attorney General. Schamus explains: The mainstream media uses the word “torture” to describe those (hundreds of) documented cases of “isolated” incidents, performed by those “few bad apples” at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. When it comes to the pervasive use of torture at Guantánamo’s Camp X-Ray and scores of other secret military prisons around the globe, the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 7, 2004

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