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Redacted

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Redacted

Starring: Izzy Diaz, Patrick Carroll, Daniel Stewart Sherman, Rob Devaney

Director: Brian De Palma

The film: 'Truth is the first casualty of war,' reads the tagline for Redacted. Based on US soldiers' gang rape, murder and burning of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl in March 2006, and their murder of her parents and younger sister, Brian De Palma's film echoes his 1989 picture Casualties of War, about GIs keeping a Vietnamese girl as a sex slave and then killing her to cover their tracks.

Like Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah, the film explores how humanity is forgotten when young men are exposed to the extremes of modern warfare, and how their regard for human life is negligible when given carte blanche to lord it over others.

Redacted sees De Palma rail against the excesses of power, his anger directed more towards the cynical schemers in Washington than the soldiers, as the film shows how the ranks are filled with working class youngsters looking for a way out of their miserable circumstances (Salazar [Izzy Diaz], for instance, says he joined the army to get the money to attend film school, which has rejected him once before anyway).

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