A War: Truth from an Oscar-nominated Film: War Is a Bore—and It Can Be a Trial
Opens February 19 at San Francisco's Embarcadero Cinema and February 26 at Berkeley's Landmark Shattuck
Director/writer Tobias Lindholm's Academy-Award-Nominated Best Foreign Language Film, A War, captures both the rigors of war and the mundane, crippling consequences for war's survivors. Filmed in the outlands of Turkey, Lindholm serves up scenes that duplicate the Afghanistan we have glimpsed in nightly news reports. But the film goes beyond the battlefield to show a war's impacts—both domestic and political—back home. Like A Few Good Men and The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, Lindholm's tale starts in a soldier's dirty world and ends in a sterile courtroom.This may be the slowest-moving war film in the history of cinema. Which is a good thing. Most war films focus on the frantic scramble of combat when a good part of a soldier's experience involves downtime—sitting, waiting, pondering, fearing, regretting. Lindholm's pacing provides viewers with sufficient time for inward reflection and evaluation about a soldier's life—line of work that is often little more than a demanding form of drudgery, but one that carries the risk of sudden, life-changing injury or violent, bloody death.
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