CinemArts, a nonprofit art film presenter, marks its third anniversary of presenting film in Downtown Frederick with the new film “The Situation” on Tuesday at the Delaplaine Visual Arts Education Center.
The presentation will be the 82nd film presentation by the organization whose mission is to bring independent, foreign, and underscreened film to Frederick.
Combining elements of thriller, romance, and war movie, “The Situation,” set exclusively in Iraq and the first US feature film to deal with the occupation, dramatizes one of the countless human stories that lie behind the headlines of the current war. When a group of American soldiers throw an Iraqi boy off a bridge in Samarra, the incident sets off a chain of events that exposes the deep rifts among the Iraqis in Samarra and results in yet another cycle of violence between the insurgents and the corrupt Iraqi police.
Anna, played by Connie Nielsen, is an American journalist who decides to write a story about the assassination of an Iraqi leader whom she admires. At the same time, she is pulling away from a relationship with Dan, Damian Lewis, an American intelligence official who thinks the war can be won with hearts and minds, and toward Zaid, Mido Hamada, a young Iraqi photographer who shows her there are people, rather than sides, in the conflict. As she tries to make sense of the half-truths of Iraq, she gets caught up in the violence and finds her life in danger.
Director Philip Haas, whose feature films include “The Music of Chance,” “Up at the Villa,” and the Oscar-nominated “Angels and Insects,” chose the war in Iraq as the subject of his latest project. “It struck me that if we could make a film during the U.S.
occupation of Iraq that dealt with the effect of the war, both on the Iraqis and the Americans, and treat it as fiction as opposed to documentary, it could have a strong impact,” he says.
The film is in Iraq, and features both Iraqi and Western characters. Haas’s first step was to find a screenwriter who could offer an informed perspective on the occupation, along with the ability to create a fictional story. Then he came across an article by Wendell Steavenson, an Anglo-American journalist in her thirties who had lived in and reported from Iraq in the heat of the conflict. When asked, Steavenson based a fictionalized version of her life and times in Iraq during the war which became the screenplay for this film.
Admission to the movie is $6 at the door and showtime is 7:30 p.m. The Delaplaine Visual Arts Education Center is at 40 S. Carroll St. in downtown Frederick.
CinemArts downtown showings have continued every other Tuesday (with a few seasonal breaks) since they opened their doors on a rainy May 18, 2004, for a sold-out showing of “Girl With a Pearl Earring.” With their roots firmly planted downtown the organization has worked with the Frederick County Public Library, Frederick Reads, ArtNext, and the 72 Film Fest in an effort to bring more film to the residents and visitors in Frederick.
Upcoming movies include the American documentary “Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus” on June 5, and the Chinese documentary “Yang Ban Xi” on June 19.
More information about CinemArts and all these films, including previews of the movies, is available at the organization’s website: www.CinemArts.org.
|
