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Combining elements of thriller, romance, and war movie, The Situation, set exclusively in Iraq and the first U.S. feature film to deal with the occupation, dramatizes one of the countless human stories that lie behind the headlines of the current war. When a group of American soldiers throw an Iraqi boy off a bridge in Samarra, the incident sets off a chain of events that exposes the deep rifts among the Iraqis in Samarra and results in yet another cycle of violence between the insurgents and the corrupt Iraqi police.
Anna (Connie Nielsen) is an American journalist who decides to write a story about the assassination of an Iraqi leader whom she admires. At the same time, she is pulling away from a relationship with Dan (Damian Lewis), an American intelligence official who thinks the war can be won with hearts and minds, and towards Zaid (Mido Hamada), a young Iraqi photographer who shows her there are people, rather than sides, in the conflict. As she tries to make sense of the half-truths of Iraq, she gets caught up in the violence and finds her life in danger.
Philip Haas, whose feature films include THE MUSIC OF CHANCE, UP AT THE VILLA, and the Oscar-nominated ANGELS & INSECTS, chose the war in Iraq as the subject of his latest project. "It struck me that if we could make a film during the U.S. occupation of Iraq that dealt with the effect of the war, both on the Iraqis and the Americans, and treat it as fiction as opposed to documentary, it could have a strong impact," he says.
Historically, political films about wars have usually come after the fact, but Haas thought that a film about the current war - a war that is both politically charged and endlessly complex - would be immediate as well as significant in the public understanding of the occupation. "There wouldn't be historical perspective," he says, "but there would be a sense of urgency, and a sense that we might be able to understand what was going on even though we are in the middle of it."
For more information on the making of this film, you can dowload a PDF press kit at: http://www.thesituationmovie.com/index.html or email laine@viff.org and I'll send one to you.
"The Situation, Philip Haas's deftly paced, well-written, and brilliantly infuriating Iraq War thriller is not only the strongest of recent geopolitical hotspot flicks but one that has been designed for maximal agitation. Based on a script by the Anglo-American journalist Wendell Steavenson, this gutsy attempt to dramatize the way Iraqis live now is an incitement to rage and despair-the most vivid critique of Bush's War yet put on screen. An independent production, The Situation was frugally shot (to excellent effect) in and around Rabat, Morocco, with a largely Arab cast and one mid-level inter national star: Connie Nielsen, who plays the American correspondent Anna. The movie is structured as an interlocking series of mysteries inside one very large and intractable brain-twister. What in the world are we doing (or do we think we're doing) in this incomprehensible landscape and how in the world are we ever going to get out?"-J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
Screeners available.
Photos available on line at http://www.vifc.org/media.html
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