Continuing to aid in HDNet’s expansion beyond a love for boobies in Hi Def, HDNet Films has been expirementing with lower budget High Def filmmaking and has released a couple films (the experimental Steven Soderbergh multi media blast Bubble and the doc Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) over the last two years. The experimentation will continue with a new Iraq war film called Redacted, to be written and directed by the guy one of my film professors called "The Anti-Christ of film": Brian DePalma.
For those unfamiliar with the term, redacted refers to the process of editing the crap out of a sensitive/confidential document before it’s allowed to be released for prime time. Taken in the context of the Iraq war (which seems to be the new hotness in filmmaking these days), you wouldn’t be wrong in assuming the film intends on exploring the cloudy and controversial arena of media reporting, omissions and cover-ups in the day and age of the blog. Redacted will spin several stories of US soldiers in the Iraq theater, with early rumors hinting that one of the stories will deal with the rape of an Iraqi girl and the subsequent murder of her family.
Shooting for Redacted is expected to start in the spring with a multi-prong release (ala Bubble) next fall.
Ironically, I’d recently rewatched DePalma’s last foray into the murkiness of combat, Casualties of War. Almost 20 years later, it’s still pretty solid. Barring recent misses like, oh, everything in the past ten years, DePalma certainly has the chops to make Redacted a poignant, sad and insightful project.