"Crash" director's film "In the Valley of Elah" started when war popular, Bush at 80% approval

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT/Reuters: Film on Trauma Of Troops Back From Iraq Hits Venice
By REUTERS
Published: September 1, 2007

VENICE (Reuters) - The scars from the Iraq war do not heal when U.S. soldiers return home, says a powerful new film starring Tommy Lee Jones that keeps the conflict at the heart of the Venice film festival this year. After Brian De Palma's "Redacted" stunned audiences with its reconstruction of horrific events in Iraq, Paul Haggis' "In the Valley of Elah" brings a more nuanced, yet moving account of the brutality some soldiers bring back to the United States.

Jones has the critics searching for the superlatives as a man whose son is murdered after returning from Iraq, and as he pieces together what happened, the Vietnam war veteran begins to question his faith in his country and its policies. One of the defining images of the film is the American flag flying upside down, a sign of a nation in distress.

Haggis said he had tried not to allow his personal opinion about the war in Iraq to influence "Elah" too heavily. "We set about to make a political film certainly, but not a partisan film," he told a news conference in Venice, where the film has its world premiere on Saturday. He said that although support for the Iraq war had waned in the United States, he began putting "Elah" together when the invasion was still popular.

"When we started on this project, our president had an 80 percent approval rating, everyone was driving around with flags on their cars and our president was telling us that it was unpatriotic to even question what was happening in Iraq. "At that time all these films were very difficult to get financed, very difficult to make."

Clint Eastwood was among those who helped get the project off the ground, Haggis said in his production notes....

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"During the Vietnam war, we had terrific journalists doing their job, reporting on things that we didn't want to hear ... Now we don't have that. I think that when that doesn't happen, then it's the responsibility of the artist to ask those difficult questions."

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/arts/entertainment-venice-iraq.html

[WTF cubed]

1. I have not heard of this but it just made my must see list. n/t