We are slowly coming to the end of our season, which will be on May 6 with the Reel Paddling Film Festival, World Tour 2014.
In the meantime we have three films left.
On Tuesday, April 8, we will show Dirty Wars at the Gibraltar Room, at 7 p.m.
The film runs for 86 minutes. Language is mostly English with subtitles when required, countries are U.S.A., Afghanistan, Iraq, Kenya, Somalia, and Yemen.
Dirty Wars is a documentary which opened to big acclaim and then winning two awards at the Sundance Film Festival last year.
In the meantime it had also been nominated for an Oscar for best documentary and received more than 30 other awards.
Despite all of the accolades and the interviews on TV, you still might not remember ever having heard of this film. And there just might be a reason for that.
Many young people nowadays have grown up with the War on Terror. They have become quite used to the news of drone attacks, shootings and bombings in various parts of the world. These are not really wars, more like counter attacks. Jeremy Scahill is a prominent investigative journalist who promised families of victims of such counter attacks to bring their stories back to the U.S.
With his documentary, Scahill shows us there is a dirty secret behind the accepted saying – War on Terror. It means that all bets are off and almost anything goes. Within the framework of War on Terror the U.S. and their supporters do not have to actually declare war, instead they defend themselves with drone strikes, night raids and U.S. government targeted killings in corners across the globe, killing untold numbers of civilians. There is such an abundance of confusion, misinformation and disorganization in general reporting of these continuous counter attacks that we most often do not know anymore who and where these enemies are. And the most difficult question arises, do we even care by now?
Scahill, who is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Mercenary Army, traces the rise of the Joint Special Operations Command, now the most secret fighting force in U.S. history, exposing operations carried out by men who do not exist on paper and will never appear before congress. No target is off-limits for the JSOC “kill list,” not even U.S. citizens.
Director Richard Rowley and writer-producer Scahill’s Dirty Wars is a chilling battle cry for the soul and conscience of an America (and their allies) few of us know exists.
Their documentary is playing like a high-octane thriller, leaving you breathless and on the edge of your seat.
Gibraltar’s back doors open at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday.
Regular admission is $9, for Film Club members $8, and $6 for seniors and students.