NYT: Film Echoes the Present in Atrocities of the Past

[Pirate Smile]

Film Echoes the Present in Atrocities of the Past

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
Published: August 9, 2005
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 8 - Like a live hand grenade brought home from a distant battlefield, the 34-year-old antiwar documentary "Winter Soldier" has been handled for decades as if it could explode at any moment.

Now, the 95-minute film - which has circulated like 16-millimeter samizdat on college campuses for decades but has never been accessible to a wide audience - is about to get its first significant theatrical release in the United States, beginning on Friday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. (Other bookings, including Chicago, Detroit, Hartford and Minneapolis, can be found at www.wintersoldierfilm.com.)

Its distributors say that the war in Iraq has made the Vietnam-era film as powerful as when it was new, and its filmmakers are calling it eerily prescient of national embarrassments like the torture at Abu Ghraib.


Rusty Sachs, a Vietnam veteran, from the 1971 antiwar documentary "Winter Soldier."

Seldom has a film seen by so few caused so much consternation for so many years.

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Mr. Doros said he hoped the film would be shown on cable television, where anyone could see it, particularly today's troops and tomorrow's. "They should see that war isn't always what they imagine from movies and books and modern media," he said. "That the atrocities, the gore, the daily horror of bombs bursting out and bullets riddling your friends' bodies next to you, have been glossed over."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/movies/09wint.html