After last week’s guilty pleasure, today’s recommended trailer offers something a bit more challenging.
Standard Operating Procedure is the name of Errol Morris’ latest film. It looks like a worthy successor to his 2003 Oscar-winner The Fog of War, a masterly dissection of the life and times of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. As a filmmaker, Morris has a history of putting injustice on celluloid: his first non-fiction work, The Thin Blue Line, actually saved a wrongly convicted man from death row and is one of the most acclaimed examples of the documentary genre.
This time round Morris has turned his attention to perhaps the most potent symbol of our wrongdoing in Iraq: Abu Ghraib.
By almost all accounts – the film showed at the Berlin Film Festival in February and won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Award – it’s a distressing watch. Morris and his fellow-investigator Philip Gourevitch have also written a book on the subject, an excerpt of which was published in the New Yorker’s March 24 issue. It makes for gripping but deeply troubling reading.
A note of praise should go to Participant Productions, the social justice-minded film company behind this and a slate of other thoughtful films, including Syriana, An Inconvenient Truth, North Country and Darfur Now. More power to them.
