The Iraq war, the Arab-Israeli conflict and other Third World woes: Mohamed El-Assyouti finds himself all too familiar with the 64th Venice International Film Festival fare EXCEPT for a film by the Egyptian Youssef Chahine (with help from Khaled Youssef) and the Tunisian Abdellatif Kechiche - two of 22 official competition entries - and a fringe focus on Moroccan film, there is hardly any Arab presence at the Venice Film Festival this year. And yet Arabs make up a major subject of discussion and commentary here. The Iraq war is the theme of two of the most critically acclaimed films in the competition so far: Brian De Palma's pseudo-documentary or mockumentary Redacted, which he scripted and shot for the first time in digital high-definition video, creating a visual texture with a more immediate and realistic feel. The film masquerades as the montage of a documentary by two fictional French filmmakers about a checkpoint in Iraq, inter-cut with the video diary of an American soldier stationed there, together with footage from Iraqi television and the internet. Resorting to the documentary format without using actual footage was to avoid the legal repercussions of using material available on the internet, explained De Palma who had done his research on surfing the www.www."In America unlike Europe, anyone can sue anyone and win the case," he noted at the press conference on the film. Hence, the title Redacted is a reference to blackening out information in documents and eyes and facial features in images to render them anonymous. The film depicts actual events that took place in Samaraa in July 2006 around an actual checkpoint controlled by six American soldiers. A pregnant woman is shot because her brother, who was driving her to hospital, did not stop, and the soldiers complained of Iraqis not understanding the signal to stop by raising hands: "They think we're waving them goodbye." The argument is that they have no choice but to follow the rules of engagement and fire at vehicles which refuse to stop to be checked for bombs. The cameras of Iraqi television report the death of Salima Sabah and her unborn child in hospital, showing her brother explaining that the soldiers had let him through and then fired. The French documentary indicates that in 2006 out of several thousands of Iraqis killed at checkpoints only 60 were confirmed insurrectionists. On their web site an Iraqi resistance movement bearing the fictional name Jayish min Allah or Army from God, in the meantime, show the planting of a bomb near the checkpoint, which kills one of the soldiers. The Americans react by breaking into a house by the checkpoint and arresting a man, who as the TV reporter points out "seems harmless" - something the soldiers insist that it is the interrogation that will determine whether he is harmless or not. Later, when two of soldiers desperately need to have sex, they go into a house where "the door already broken" and "the father is away in prison"; they kill the mother, the crippled grandfather and the younger daughter, then rape 15- year-old Farah before they shoot her in the head and burn her body. Soldiers Rush and Flake were sexually aroused by the veiled adolescent whom they daily searched, frisking her entire body as she passed them on her way to school. They were suspicious of the girls giving them dates: "You eat this shit, next thing you know you'll be spitting blood." The soldier Lawyer McCoy however was opposed to their act but he could not stop them, especially as soldier Angel Salazar, who is video shooting his diary to apply to film school, decides to go along with a camera hidden on his helmet to make a fly-on- the-wall record. Ironically, McCoy had suggested Salazar read a book titled Appointment in Samaraa, in which an Arab runs into Death in a Baghdad marketplace, then flees to Samaraa, but Death, who is surprised to see him in Baghdad when he is scheduled to take his life in Samaraa, catches up with him there. Salazar, the fictional documentary filmmaker through whose camera we see the daily life of the soldiers, is like the John Locke in Michelangleo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975), whose death shows the futility of filmmaking that is content with observing reality. De Palma, who has questioned the relationship of film to reality infilms like Blow- Out -- based on Antonioni's Blowup -- and Snake Eyes, is making a strong artistic statement against the US media and the limitations of visual representations. The opening sequences has Salazar picking up his camera on one side and McCoy picking up his own on the other. Shooting and countershooting, their dialogue highlights the I'm-filming-you-filming- me nature of cinema. Salazar insists that "this camera never lies", prompting McCoy to retort that this is exactly what a camera does -- which is one of De Palma's credo - "Cinema lies 24 frames a second" - a reversal Jean-Luc Godard's dictum. Rush's reaction to the camera is "We're under strict orders not to speak to the media", while Flake orders Salazar to turn it off only when he is proposing the rape of Farah: "This is off the record." For the duet Rush and Flake, "the only language these sand niggers understand is force", and they are there to "fuck and fight". After they kill the pregnant woman Rush says, "We can't afford remorse. If you feel remorse you're weak. If you're weak you die." For them the Iraqis are "cockroaches" and they wonder if the baby in the womb of that woman was going to be another "terrorist". De Palma continues to use Rush and Flake to caricature American right-wing policy in Iraq. What are they doing in Iraq? "Keeping the Iraqi government alive." The girl they rape is just "spoils of war"; when interrogated about the rape incident Flake says, "Soldiers like us keep Arabs outside your door steps... We're making sure the motherfuckers are dead." When they break into the house the first time they claim to be "looking for evidence", and to the Iraqi TV anchors' question about whether they found any, Rush shows papers with Arabic handwriting and says: "This writing is Iraqi... I have people who will translate it for me and we'll find out." But when they raid the house the second time to "take their revenge on a 15-yar-old girl", as McCoy puts it, the claim is that they are looking for weapons of mass destruction. With the extermination of the whole Iraqi family, the deed is blamed on "Sunni-Shiite things", yet the Iraqi father says to the TV camera that he is Sunni and so is everyone around, that Sunnis don't do this and that he doesn't understand the investigations the US army is carrying out. At the same time McCoy's father warns him about reporting the incident to his superiors who, he says, would simply question his sanity: "They don't need another Abu Ghraib." Salazar and McCoy's minds are shattered by the event and he admits, "There are things you shouldn't see. Everybody watches and does nothing... Make a video for people to watch and do nothing." McCoy has snap shots of death and suffering in his brain; he believes the experience has marked him for life. At the conference De Palma remarked that censorship in the US media prevents the reality of war in Iraq from reaching the people; and although information is available on the internet, this is not enough. He hopes his film despite its limited distribution -- by Magnolia -- will bring a clearer picture of what is taking place in Iraq to a wider audience, which would be incensed enough to pressure their congressmen to stop the war. The filmmaker laments the fact that the "architects of the Iraq war" are the same people who took part in Vietnam: the only lesson they have learned is how to better disinform and hoodwink the public. He recalls the impact of the images of Vietnam published in Life magazine on the people. De Palma had made a film about a similar rape incident in Vietnam in Casualties of War (1989), but it was a fictional drama in form. This time De Palma's choice of style comes from his source of information -- the internet -- and the revolution in digital technology, which makes for better a chance of images reaching the people. What he regrets is that, even despite this fact, "the terrible thing about this war is that we don't see these images". Redacted had the highest ratings in the Italian media in the first few days of the festival. AMONG the films competing in the Horizons competition, on the other hand, is the 90-minute Italian documentary Mothers, directed by Barbara Cupisti, produced by Alex Ponti and shot in Israel and Palestine, in which the mothers of casualties on both sides of the armed conflict are interviewed. An Israeli mother speaks of losing both her sons to the army: a dancer to whose exemption Moshe Dayan objected in person, pointing out his physical ability; and a young man who kills himself, leaving the note, "I could not face another day of army. Excuse me father." Another mother recounts how, before he returned to the frontline in Lebanon, where he was serving as a paramedic, her son had a premonition of his own death, exclaiming, "Why aren't you telling me not to go to Lebanon again?" What makes the interviews special is how they are visually inter-cut with personal video footage and photographs showing the children, a stylistic motif maintained throughout the film: a human growing up from early childhood through adolescence to early adulthood - and sudden death. There is a clear sense of what the mothers must be feeling, and it is carried through the shift to Palestinian mothers, one of whose sons was shot dead while carrying the coffin of a friend who was killed by Israelis: "Why doesn't the Israeli mother stop her son from carrying a weapon and firing at unarmed children? " The family is shown watching a video of the funeral on a computer screen. And up to a point each side blames the other, with the film presenting two parallel lines that never cross. Then, suddenly, enter the heavens. One Israeli mother, for example, regrets having no faith: "Maybe if I have any kind of belief it would be easier. You have to rely on something. Having belief is strength and power. I don't have it and it is too bad. [...] I was trying to ask questions and get answers but there is none. I scream without voice." A Palestinian mother likewise has given up all hope: "The life of the Palestinian people is all suffering. God forgive us. We were never able to give our children comfort or let them play like other children. They are born to suffer and die." Another adds, "Death became more comfortable than life." One Israeli mother lost five children all at once in a bombing. She describes in detail discovering there scattered body parts of her children, this being another motif in the film: both Israeli and Palestinian mothers recall on camera the moment they first saw the dead bodies of their children. Two Israeli mothers speak of losing their daughters to suicide bombings. The first says, "There is no explanation for the mass murder of children. No justification. It is very disturbing to me when people inject this cruelty and evil with some reason, some justification. Because you just can't." She adds that she has no desire to speak to people who are interested in murdering children. However, in a later scene she says, "I want to make a plea through this film for all mothers and politicians to do something for peace." The second mother gives a slightly different perspective: "Our children go to the army to fight a war of defence [...] I don't think I have anything to say to Palestinian mothers. They are from a completely different culture. What she has in her heart for her children is different from what I have in my heart towards mine." And yet the mother of a suicide bomber does not condone the murder of innocent civilians; when she sees such incidents on television, she says, it upsets her - because it means Israeli retaliation. Her husband reads the letter left by his "martyr" son before the operation was carried out, recalling the Israeli suicide letter in the first sequence of the film. And once again an Israeli mother similarly says she did not push her two sons who died in the army to join, neither did she object to them joining. The last sequence shows two microbuses picking up mothers, with the film ending on a meeting that looks like a group therapy session for the mothers of casualties but is actually an initiative for peace. After the screening, one jury member was telling another that the film is "very manipulative", since the Palestinian side had the lion's share of shocking imagery of death and destruction while only one incident of suicide bombing in Israel was shown. "Sure, showing the mothers of dead children crying is moving; but even though they say that they are not terrorists the Palestinians are. They support Hamas, a terrorist organization." A typical reaction, judging by the number of press and public who had left after the first 20 minutes, the point at which it becomes clear that the opening interviews are but a prelude to a survey of the violence on both sides, without bias, showing the devastating effects of violence and counterviolence and depicting aggression and excess in both Israel and Palestine: aircraft, tanks, bombs and machine guns on the one hand, and the aggressor's own body on the other. Constant closeups on the mothers' eyes drive the emotional point home, while views of their surroundings point up two facts: the huge gap in economic and social standards between Israelis and Palestinians with all that that entails about opportunities for education and employment; and the much younger age of both the Palestinian victims and theirbeyond the bias of dozens of Palestine-oriented films already made on the issue. As the end credits were on the screen and the lights turned own, tears preceded a 10-minute standing ovation. In other screenings - Ken Loach It's a Free World, for example - themes of conflict and tragedy recur in other parts of the world: at the climax, a hooded Eastern European immigrant tells his tied up hostage - the protagonist, Angie - that his colleague lost two sons to exploitative cheap-labour employment in England. Angie finds poor immigrants jobs and takes a commission, making a "profit out of their life", as she and her colleague Rose put it. Though initially kind to the Iranian Mahmoud and his family, giving them food and shelter as well as finding them work, once such kindness comes in conflict with her business interests - she needs to bring in others - she does not hesitate to report them to the authorities, demanding their evacuation even though she knows that Mahmoud, the book publisher whose activities were banned in Iran, will be prosecuted on his return to his country. This attitude is what the right-wing and the mainstream media it controls implicitly want people to adopt, Loach said in the press conference, adding that consumerist society asks you to "screw your neighbour instead of supporting them". Typical of their modus operandi, Loach and the screenwriter with whom he has collaborated for the last ten years, Paul Laverty, undertook field research of the situation of immigrants in England before writing the script - which he says excluded many incidents of white deaths, accidents, black labour market mafia violence, etc., since the filmmakers' decision was to show the point of view of the white European exploiter of new immigrants from poorer countries. In the case of Angie, her transformation is driven by pressure and exploitation from her bosses; recently fired and fighting for her life, at 33 years old she decides to turn into a boss herself and so exploit others. She is fearful of ending up like her father, who is in his sixties but poor. She is eager to look after her 11-year-old boy, who beats up his schoolmates when they speak badly of her. Driven by greed, she is keen on her business growing even if that entails working in the labour black market. Loach and Laverty remark that they can understand and even "sympathise" with the protagonist's need to survive in the capitalist jungle. In this film Loach, 71, who earned the Cannes Festival's Palm D'Or last year for The Wind that Shakes the Barely, about the Irish revolution, resumes his criticism of capitalism and its alleged provision of freedom for all. The film clearly shows how values of fraternity and equality are sacrificed in London, where only stronger beasts of prey survive, and violence and aggression are the most common ways of carrying on. In the press conference Loach gave examples of figures emphasising the ridiculous income differences between people in the world today: someone earning millions of dollars in the first world is indirectly exploiting the cheap labour of thousands in a Third World country such as Bangladesh, where a worker earns two pence an hour. Laverty says he is interested in studying the situation in China where he believes large- scale exploitation of human labour takes place. Loach added, "There is a consensus that progress is not possible otherwise, that the spectacular inequality between rich and poor is nature's way. But it is not something that is in the course of nature that we cannot do something about. Of course this is not the only way." Loach's style of minimalist realism recalls the simplicity of the British "Free Cinema" of the 1960s; using normal lenses and straight-on angles, he turns minimal lighting on the colours and textures of sets and costumes stressing the coldness of London. For his part the Taiwanese-American filmmaker Ang Lee is not so minimalist in recreating the Shanghai of the 1940s with a lavish mise-en-sc ne. The maker of the Best Foreign Film Oscar winner Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000), Hulk (2003), and the Venice Golden Lion winner Brokeback Mountain (2005), about a love story between a gay couple, which earned it the Guinness record of the American film least distributed in the US, has now returned to Taiwan to make Lust, Caution (2007), about a group of amateur actors-cum- resistance activists during the Japanese occupation. Lees explains, "For the first time a Chinese film discusses the Japanese occupation of China, victim of 200 years of Western and Eastern occupation. It was a taboo subject, never to be discussed. No one was interested in bringing it up. There were traitors from both sides among the collaborators and the communists. China in that day was like Iraq today, with the division between those on the side of the Americans and those considering it an invasion." His protagonist loses her virginity and trains in the arts of love in order to seduce a high official in Chinese intelligence who collaborates with the Japanese occupation. The film, addressing issues of female sexuality and the perils of role playing and using sex for a cause, included two explicit scenes that had critics in the press conference accusing Lee of exploiting the byand filming "actual intercourse". However, Lee's art lies in his working with film-noir subject matter that was repeatedly taken up by Hollywood and its imitators, notably in Hitchcock's Notorious, starring Carry Grant and Ingrid Bergman (1945), two actors his protagonist admires, alluding implicitly to her falling under the influence of these patriotic films where the female tricks the bad guy and ends up unscathed in the arms of the hero. But Lee goes on to take desire and sexuality to depths considered taboo in Hollywood. That Lee adapted a well read short story in Chinese literature and addressed the Japanese occupation as historical background aesthically enriched the whole endeavour. Still, it fell a little short of the critics' expectations, making an award unlikely in the end. Another filmmaker trying to change Hollywood is the Canadian Paul Haggis, Oscar winner and nominee for his screenplays of Clint Eastwood's A Million Dollar Baby (2004) and Letters from Iowa Jima (2006) and his screenplay and direction of Crash (2005). His Venice competition entry about the war in Iraq elicited a 10-minute standing ovation; and he declared that making a film about the Iraq war, far from being a fad, is actually "a necessity". In the Valley of Elah is a bout an American soldier who disappears after a few days of his return to the US from Iraq. His Vietnam veteran father, together with his mother and a police detective from New Mexico, where he was last seen, embark on a journey in his trail, discovering high-level military corruption as they go along and in so doing revealing the ugly reality of war and coming into conflict with the authorities. The film was a screenplay that Haggis had had as a project for four years. Back then, he remarks, America was in favour of the war and cars used to parade in the streets waving the American flag. Whoever was opposed to war was accused by the Bush administration of being unpatriotic, and the ever respectful Hollywood toed the line and was fearful of approaching the idea of producing a story which would upset the powers that be. Like De Palma's, Haggis's point of departure was images of dead Iraqi women and children with the cheerful faces of American soldiers looking on, which he too found on the internet. They were displayed in the manner of music videos, the filmmaker noted with distaste, adding that even so they still managed to carry information contrary to that broadcast by the official media. "For this I decided to make the film, because cinema has the duty to intervene when the media fails to do its job and tell the truth about the war. All wars are horrible and especially ones in the cities like that in Iraq have very high civilian victims. Our soldiers live in constant fear of the insurgents and everyone is an enemy. They are forced to make immediate decisions which are often the wrong ones. Women and men return confused, devastated and corrupted by a war which was born for false reasons and because of corruption." Haggis maintains that his films is political but not taking sides, and when he showed it to soldiers with experience in Iraq to get their opinions they were very positive. A huge number of the returnees from Iraq, he emphasises, are unable to adapt; many disappear and the rate of suicides is unprecedented. Comparing Iraq to Vietnam, he says that civilian massacres are the daily routine in Iraq, while in Vietnam they were not; in the earlier war the media was free and films were made when the war was over. However, the critical reception of Haggis's film was not as warm as that of De Palma's. Natalia Aspesi of La Republica for instance finds the film weak for its triller plot formula and dependence on Hollywood stars: Charlize Theron, Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon.
