Year: 2007
Director: Nick Broomfield
Writer: Nick Broomfield, Marc Hoeferlin, Anna Telford
Cinematographer: Mark Wolf
Cast: Elliot Ruiz, Yasmine Hanani, Andrew McLaren, Matthew Knoll
Running Time: 93 min.
IMDB SITE
Nick Broomfield’s latest film, which won him the Best Director award at the San Sebastian Film Festival, is a highly realistic, fictional rendering of an incident that took place in the village of Haditha, Iraq, where much of the insurgency has taken place. Broomfield will present an extended excerpt (over 40 minutes) of the film (which is unable to be screened in the U.S. in advance of its theatrical release), and talk about the background of its production. In November 2005, a roadside explosive killed one US Marine and wounded two others. Enraged fellow Marines exacted revenge by killing twenty-four Iraqis: men, women and children. In Battle for Haditha, Broomfield sets out to recreate the incident, imagining the circumstances that provoked the violence and led to the massacre. The dialogue is largely improvised by a cast of non-professionals, many of whom had seen extensive combat in Iraq. “The movie is told from an equal playing field – from the Iraqis’ point of view, the insurgents’ point of view and the Marines’ point of view. There’s no black or white in this movie, it’s all just a (messed) up situation for everybody. We represented the Corps in a positive light. … We would never sell out our fellow Marines for 15 minutes of fame,” says Andrew McLaren, one of the movies actors and himself an ex-marine. “This movie is far from liberal propaganda, and is the most accurate portrayal of the War on Terror yet.”
