Brian De Palma
Redacted

Redacted means to redact or better "prepare for publication". Often in a redacted document or image, personal (or objectionable) information has been obscured or deleted; therefore, the term is often used to define documents or images from which sensitive information has been removed.

Almost twenty years after his last war-crime-themed film ("Casualties of War", from 1989), Brian De Palma returns to the theme of war crimes, also starting from a real event this time: in March 2006, five American soldiers from the 502nd Infantry Regiment stationed in Iraq, assigned to guard a checkpoint in Mahmudiyah (a city south of Baghdad, within the notorious "Triangle of Death"), brutally raped and killed a 14-year-old girl, massacred her entire family (father, mother, and 5-year-old sister) and burned their bodies to try to erase any trace. A horrifying massacre, as ignoble as it is absurd.

De Palma chooses to reconstruct the events through a variety of perspectives: primarily using images (intentionally amateurish in style) from the video diary of one of the involved soldiers, but also TV news reports, a (fake) French documentary on the Iraq war (a disorienting film within a film), surveillance camera footage, even blogs, webcams, and clips of videos from YouTube. Forget the self-indulgent mannerist De Palma of "The Black Dahlia"; this work is a sort of digital collage, an original mosaic film where each piece finds its place to provide the most faithful picture possible of this horrible story.  

Erroneously (and stupidly) labeled as "anti-American", the film has sparked heavy criticism and repeated attacks from the reactionary establishment at home, leading to a true boycott (see also, in this regard, the page on IMDB, full of polemical posts and with a shamefully low average score). Unfortunately, even in Europe, despite the triumphant presentation at the Venice Film Festival in 2007, which earned De Palma the Silver Lion for Best Direction (and a 10-minute standing ovation at the end of the screening), the countries where it was officially distributed in cinemas are really few (obviously among these is not Italy, where it was broadcast directly by Sky a few months ago).

In reality, it is a film that primarily questions the manipulation of information by the media in modern conflicts, but also how, unfortunately, human beings, when certain precise circumstances occur (such as the disappearance of all individual responsibility and the consequent certainty of impunity, characteristics of every war), can regress to a semi-animal state, discarding all moral scruples to indulge in acts usually considered abhorrent.

"Redacted" concludes with a series of chilling photographs of civilian victims of the Iraq war, introduced by a caption reading "Collateral Damage - authentic photos of the Iraq war". These are undoubtedly atrocious images, painful to see, but necessary to remind us of what is culpably hidden by the media: the blood shed by innocent victims. And the film, which in itself is a ruthless act of accusation, at times shocking, could not have a more heartbreaking ending.

The first victim of war is the truth.