Brian De Palma wins Best Director award at Venice with 'Redacted'

[chat_noir]

Source: Yahoo News via AFP

VENICE, Italy (AFP) - Veteran US director Brian De Palma won the Best Director award at the Venice film festival on Saturday for "Redacted," his hard-hitting Iraq war film.

The dramatisation of the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl by US soldiers, was also honoured on Friday with the Future Film Festival Digital Award, for the film that makes the best use of animation or visual effects.

De Palma, who is best known for such violent fictions as the psychic thriller "Carrie" and the gangster movie "Scarface" (1983), turns 67 on Tuesday.

The film exposing the ugly reality of the Iraq war seared the big screen at the Venice film festival Friday, with director Brian De Palma saying he hoped it would help end America's military occupation.

"The pictures are what will stop the war," De Palma told a news conference after the showing of the movie.


Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070908/ennew_afp/entertainmentvenice_070908195807;_ylt=A0geu1KID.NGiL0A5QAAAAAA

[Fridays Child]

1. Good. Now, if only we could see the film.

[3waygeek]

7. HDNet Films is planning to release the film

in November. In the past, HDNet Films has done simultaneous theater/DVD/TV releases for some of their films -- they may do it for this one.

[Hissyspit]

8. Yes, it is being advertised on HDNet.

That is probably where I will see it, unless some friends want to go to the theatre.

[helderheid]

19. thanks for the heads up!

[Vidar]

2. Kudos to Mr. De Palma.

[bluestateguy]

3. I hope we get to see this movie in the US...beyond just New York and LA

nt

[Spazito]

4. Great news! Thanks for posting this! n/t

[CGowen]

5. On imdb: US users: 3.4 Non-US users: 7.8 ???

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0937237/ratings

[Hissyspit]

9. 32 freepers rating a film they haven't seen yet.

And probably won't see.

[Crap_in_a_Hat]

23. Worked for "Last Temptation of Christ"

We allowed that one to be made, and now look! Christianity the world over is completely defunct! ...Oh, yeah. Now I remember.

[The Wizard]

6. But why

does Dago director DePalma hate America?:sarcasm:

[Cha]

10. Brian De Palma is still

going strong and is only gettng better.

[Downtown Hound]

11. Casualties of War redux

Same shit, different war. Kudos to De Palma for bringing the situation to light. If only more Americans had taken his earlier film about the same subject to heart, maybe we wouldn't be in this situation again.

[maximusveritas]

15. It does sound quite similar

However, I've also heard that the movie isn't just about this one incident. It follows a number of different storylines. I hope it has the effect De Palma thinks it will.

[Name removed]

12. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[IndianaGreen]

13. More US troops charged with Iraqi girl's rape and murder (The Guardian, 10-Jul-06)

Here is The Guardian's take on this last year.

More US troops charged with Iraqi girl's rape and murder

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington

Monday July 10, 2006

The Guardian

Four more soldiers have been charged with the rape and murder of a young Iraqi woman and her family, the most explosive of the five war crimes investigations currently under way in Iraq.
A fifth soldier was charged with dereliction of duty for failing to report the events of the night of March 12 when a group of soldiers are alleged to have abandoned their checkpoint to enter the home of an Iraqi family in the town of Mahmudiya. They allegedly raped and killed a young woman inside the house, and shot dead her parents and young sister.

In recent weeks, 16 soldiers have been charged with murders in Iraq - more than during the first three years of the war. No Marines have been charged so far in the worst alleged atrocity, the killing of 24 Iraqis at Haditha, but that has been overshadowed by the Mahmudiya episode.

Iraq's prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, has demanded an independent investigation into the alleged rape and killings, and said the immunity granted to US troops in Iraq has encouraged abuse. Sensitivities in the case deepened yesterday as Reuters news agency reported that the rape victim was only 14 years old.

Stephen Green, a former member of the 502nd infantry regiment, was charged last week in a US court with rape and murder. Mr Green, a former private, was granted an honourable discharge from the military for a personality disorder before the alleged rape and murder came to light. In an FBI affidavit, Mr Green and two other soldiers are accused of stalking the rape victim, identified by hospital authorities as Abeer Qassim Hamza.

On the night of March 12, Green and the other unnamed soldiers are alleged to have left their post, drunk alcohol and changed into dark clothing, and entered the victims' home.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1816666,00.html

[Crap_in_a_Hat]

14. Appropriate for De Palma

It's ironic that, after glamorizing a psychotic cokehead with a Napoleon complex in an earlier film, he's turning his back on another one by denouncing Dubya.

[tomreedtoon]

16. This is DePalma. The killing of women is his strong suit.

He loves to kill women in the most horrible fashion possible in his films. See Carrie, Blow Out, The Fury and Dressed to Kill. He's a gorehound. The murders are his entertainment.

God, the people progressives will latch onto for hope, instead of doing the real work themselves.

[trumad]

17. I didn't know he wrote Carrie?

Now you're probably going to say that Steve King likes to kill women too.

Ugg

[Pachamama]

18. Kudos to DePalma - May this film help keep the memory of Abeer and her senseless murder and rape

in everyone's minds and to never forget....

I still cry about what was done to her and her family....the picture that was published of her will seer my memory forever.

And I'm glad it was DePalma who did the movie. He's a master at showing violence and gore. I remember when I was in college and a friend of mine who was a film major took me to see in downtown LA DePalma's "Dressed to Kill". My friend the film major pointed out how DePalma used various techniques from Hitchcock and also the way he loves to show the blood and the act itself. This may seem horrific to some, but its quite powerful in the imagery and the emotion it evokes. This is why I think no one could possibly do it better than DePalma to tell the story of the horror that Abeer and her family endured.

[tomreedtoon]

24. Are you familiar with the meaning of "gorehound?"

It is someone who LOVES to watch women die. There are a lot of them. Check out a little magazine called "GoreZone" that features sick movies like DePalma's.

He doesn't give a damn for the outrage of killing. He WANTS women to die. That's how he gets off!

You are celebrating somebody who loves the act of killing, especially women. If this film is successful, he'll do a whole series of grotesque killing of women. And the misogynistic bastards out there in the dark will be cheering.

[ProudDad]

27. You don't read the Red Cross disclaimers do you

At the end of each DePalma flick: "No women were actually killed during the making of this film."

Maybe it's time to learn the difference between reality and a work of fiction...

[tomreedtoon]

30. What difference between reality and fiction?

They affect people just the same. Seeing a woman killed on the screen and seeing one killed in reality, right in front of you, have the same psychological affect. Or "happy feeling," as DePalma would put it.

Horror films are all right-wing propaganda. They encourage and promote fear. Didn't it seem strange to you that the big horror films of the 70's - the Freddy Krueger/Jason Voorhees/Michael Meyers films - were big at the same time Ronald Reagan was big? It was a logical consequence.

After all, the whole point of DePalma's terror and Bush's terror are the same - make people bend to your will. After leaving these exercises in sadism, people are just a little bit more ready to accept Republican and right-wing ideas. Nobody ever came out of those films a better person. And no good person ever made them.

[toddaa]

20. Sean Connery is a woman?

[ShaneGR]

21. Uhhh, that's ridiculous, lol

Carrie is a book by Stephen King. If you read the book and then saw the movie, they're exactly the same. Carrie goes nuts at the prom, kills everyone, runs home and kills her mother and herself. Was De Palma supposed to change the ending?

[tomreedtoon]

25. Perhaps he shouldn't enjoy killing women in films.

Perhaps sadism is not a good thing for people to see. There are a lot of sadists out there in the world and he's encouraging them. Perhaps if DePalma was a decent human being he wouldn't have made the movie in the first place.

And yes, I know Stephen King wrote the goddamned original book. DePalma made it a hit. Like Bush and Cheney, the two of them worked together. But King grew tired of sex murder. DePalma celebrates it.

[ProudDad]

28. No offense but your post is just weird... (n/t)

[IndianaGreen]

29. The film is based on actual events, not fiction, so the prowar people will attack the artist

rather than talk about the film itself or the events in which the film is based.

[Supersedeas]

31. typical WH/Freep strategy

[zonkers]

22. You are 100% correct.. I, too am suspicious of Brian's newfound humanity. He has

made a career out of recreating scenes of rape, murder and brutality for entertainment purposes. I suspect his newfound humanity is the result of his feeling surpassed by newer gore meisters. He is not the one to be making this film. It just is not him. Give me a Stephen Frears or a Werner Herzog -- cinema masters with a real humanity.

[demoleft]

26. Glad glad glad about that.

I'm a supporter of aged masters - the only ones who still have the nerve to take reality and history full in the face.
And to use art to tell us.
See this old post, http://journals.democraticunderground.com/demoleft/18