Coming Attractions: Summer 2013 Trailer Program

The summer edition of the DC Film Society's twice-annual "Coming Attractions" trailer program is 7:00pm on June 4 at Landmark's E Street Cinema. Bill Henry and Tim Gordon will once again serve as hosts and as usual there will be lots of giveaways and door prizes.

Some of the trailers to be shown might include the latest Superman flick, Man of Steel animated films Epic and Monsters University, Baz Lurhmann's The Great Gatsby, Vince Vaughn in The Internship, Will Smith's After Earth, Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing, and 300: Rise of an Empire, Star Trek: Into Darkness, Elysium, Iron Man 3, The Hangover Part 3, Turbo, Now You See Me, The Wolverine, The Lone Ranger, World War Z, and maybe a few extras.

An updated list of trailers to be shown is posted on the website.

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We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks: Q&A with Director Alex Gibney

By James McCaskill, DC Film Society Member

Julian Assange and his Wikileaks website seem to be spawning a cottage industry in the past few years. We've had one documentary (Luc Hermann and Paul Moreira's 2011 film, Wikileaks: War, Lies and Videotape), the UK TV series (Wikileaks: The Secret Life of a Superpower, 2012, and DC Film Festival's Open Night film, Underground: The Julian Assange Story (Robert Connolly, Australia, 2012). Benedict Cumberbatch (playing Assange) and James McAvoy (playing the German technical expert, Domscheit-Berg who had a contentious breakup) are in The Fifth Estate.

But right now we have Alex Gibney's documentary, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks (US, 2012).

At a recent preview screening at Landmark's E Street Cinema on May 21, Gibney was interviewed by Josh Gerstein, White House reporter for Politico specializing in legal and national security issues. The following are extracts from that Q&A.

Josh Gerstein: This is a timely film with the Department of Justice crackdown on journalists. What do you think about this legal action?
Alex Gibney: It's been a slow momentum through Bush to Obama. The Executive Branch does not like to give up power. The more they have, the more they want. Obama promised openness but has classified more documents.

Josh Gerstein: Tell us about your interview with Julian Assange.
Alex Gibney: I'm not sure what the novelty is. Julian has given many interviews over the past few years. Julian has a limited view. He demanded money and when he did not get that he wanted final cut rights. Didn't get that either. There is a certain irony to someone claiming free speech political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy as their president has a history of arresting reporters. Another point where Julian has misled was his claim of a committee reviewing to redact names from the Manning dump of hundreds of thousands of classified documents. There was no 'committee', just Manning. Only a handful of names were redacted.

Josh Gerstein: Your documentary downplays the reliability of his being deported from Sweden to the US. Is he in criminal jeopardy?
Alex Gibney: He may be in jeopardy. He has confounded the situation by targeting his followers to vilify the two women in Sweden who have brought rape charges against him. Was it an attempt to get the women to drop their charges? I found no evidence that Sweden has plans to deport him. No charges have been filed against him as he must be in Sweden's physical custody before charges can be made. An Alexandria Grand Jury is still investigating him so charges could be brought. Julian has a way of twisting the facts into ways that are not accurate. Most people don't know that Julian has four children by four different women. At first the Swedish women only wanted him to take an HIV test as the condom broke. He refused but has later, after they filed charges, agreed to the test.

Josh Gerstein: There is a modest role for the the NY Times in the movie. More Guardian (UK newspaper) and Australian sources.
Alex Gibney: There is a lot to cover in this film. Digital chinks in negotiating with Julian. A lot of people talked about Julian and the journalists.

Josh Gerstein: You brought in Bradley Manning.
Alex Gibney: I started the story about Julian and Wikileaks. I thought that a central character had gone missing: Bradley Manning. Julian has become a large character. Fiction films are underway based on him. The Guardian was preventing me from talking with Julian as they have deals for film and books. He has a far more balanced image: not a perfect hero, not perfect villain.

Josh Gerstein: You cover a lot of people: Assange, Manning, Domscheit-Berg (who was once Julian's right hand man until he felt betrayed by Domscheit-Berg), former CIA Director Michael Hayden, Adrian Lamo (the hacker who turned Manning in to the FBI).
Alex Gibney: There are a lot of people. Three hours, thirty minutes in the first cut. State Department is well covered. A lot of details but we had to focus on certain core elements. You can't do everything in a movie. A lot of those interviewed exaggerated their story. The purpose of the film is to get people to think. It is against the law to over classify. Never been a government official to be prosecuted for doing that.

We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks opened May 31 at the AFI Silver Theater.

Fill the Void: Q&A with Director Rama Burshtein and Producer Asaf Amir

By Ron Gordner, DCFS Member

Fill the Void is directed by a female Hassidic Orthodox Jew and filmed within the community. The film centers on an Orthodox family in Tel Aviv where the 18 year old daughter Shira is looking forward to an arranged marriage. When her older sister Esther dies in childbirth, Shira's marital plans are put on hold. How can her newly widowed brother-in law cope with raising a newborn baby and also begin looking for a replacement wife and mother of his child? How Shira and her family face the dilemmas they are presented with is a rich cinematic adventure into religious and family life and sacrifices. The film screened in September 2012 at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and was later named the 2012 Israeli Oscar nomination for best foreign language film. Both the film and actress Hadas Yaron won the Israeli Film Academy awards. Hadas also was named best actress at the 2102 Venice Film Festival. Note: spoilers may be contained in the Q&A.



Audience Question: It seems that it is not illegal to marry your sister or brother-in-law in Israel, but is this not allowed in some countries?
Rama Burshtein: I am not aware in what countries it is not legal. (Audience member says she thinks it is not legal in France or Canada--but the audience quickly says that is not true.) Again I don't know of it being illegal anywhere, but also it is not required in the Orthodox community. It is not considered doing a mitzvah to do this in the family. So I wondered how could this happen also, but when researching it, you find that the family values are so strong that at the end I felt yes it could be very natural to fall in love with your big sister's husband after your sister has died. The family allows it so it can happen.

Audience Question: Are any of the actors from the Orthodox community?
Rama Burshtein: All the extras are from the community, but the main actors (except for the matchmaker) are from the secular community.

Audience Question: Is this your first movie?
Rama Burshtein: It is my first official film, although I have been doing films for women within the Orthodox community for years. Those are small films with only women in them and have simple grammar and are done on small budgets. The Orthodox community does not show films from the outside world. So this is a first doing such a big film for me, although it was made for $1 million.

Audience Question: I understand this was started as a Sundance program. How has it changed since your original project started?
Rama Burshtein: I made changes in Sundance and used their great lab. We made DP and scene changes but by all means it did not end there. I worked on it later also with changes.

Audience Question: Has the Orthodox community has seen it and if so, how they have reacted to the film?
Rama Burshtein: This was filmed by an insider to the Orthodox community. The film will be released in Israel next month (October 2012) so I will have to wait for the Israeli outside comments, but in my small community it has been very well received. The community is usually very suspicious of outsiders trying to interpret their religion and lifestyle, but in this case it is different. So I will have to wait and hope that the other Orthodox communities will like it also.

Audience Question: How would a woman not of Orthodox faith react to the film? Do the woman really have much of a say in their future?
Rama Burshtein: First I did not make this film for the Orthodox community, I made it for Israel at large and other countries, which is why I am at this and other festivals. I do feel that the older women in the film do have a say in their lives, but it is a bit different than the voice being upfront. But they do manage the whole thing really. They are strong and her choices in the end are not forced on her and are not about a duty. These are the choices she makes. It's a movie about family, choice, and complication with that drama. But I still see it as a very feminist film, although I am not a feminist in any sense. I think I present the women in the film as being very quietly strong. I don't think a man could present them this way.

Audience Question: Could you discuss the note that Shira gave to the rabbi? What was your decision-making there?
Rama Burshtein: It was in the script and shot, but I saw that when I showed the note that the audiences got very confused. She says in the note, "Please close up my heart." I feel it is clear that her heart is open to where the rabbi did not bless the union the first time, but people interpreted it differently. So I left it out and you can decide what it means.

Audience Question: Is Shira happy at the end?
Rama Burshtein: It's open for interpretation. It doesn't matter what I meant, I find that everyone sees his/her own film so that is up to your perception.

Fill the Void is scheduled to open June 7 at Landmark's Bethesda Row Theater.

Dirty Wars: Q&A with Jeremy Scahill, Investigative Journalist

By Annette Graham, DC Film Society Member

A screening of Dirty Wars was held May 30 at Landmark's E Street Cinema. Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, author of the international bestselling Blackwater, was present for discussion. Kelly Jane Torrance, movie critic at the Examiner, moderated. Dirty Wars is a documentary which follows Jeremy Scahill into the hidden world of America's covert wars, from Afghanistan to Yemen and Somalia.

Kelly Jane Torrance: How do you ever end a war on terror? Terror is a nebulous concept that can be defined to be anything. Didn't just this week President Obama say war on terror was over?
Jeremy Scahill: No. It's been reported, but it certainly isn't over. People look at the Somali thing and say, "You're brave for doing that." But the real heroes are the unfamous journalists who are Yemeni, or Iraqi, or Afghans, or Somalis who take the real risk. If you look at the journalists who were killed around the world over the past year, the overwhelming majority of them are not Americans and the overwhelming majority of them are not reporting in English. And there are journalists missing today in Syria and elsewhere and so I try to carry their stories with me. If those of us that have a platform don't speak up for jouranlists when they are in prison or when they are targeted or when they are harassed, regardless of what their politics are, then we're not doing our job as journalists. And Abdulelah Haider Shaye, the journalist in the film is still in prison and he released a statement the other day, in a note smuggled out of jail, saying that the only person keeping him in prison is President Obama. It's my understanding that he is losing his mind in solitary confinement. I think President Obama is trying to have it both ways. On the one hand he gave a speech that for many liberals probably resonated very strongly for them. You have an American president who won a Nobel Peace Prize who is a constitutional law professor, who is engaged in policies that, if John McCain had done it, liberals would have been screaming impeachment in the streets, but instead there's this cheerleading of the counterterrorism policies of the administration. I think a lot of it is just liberals and democrats have completely checked their conscience at the coatroom of the Obama presidency for five years and I hope it doesn't... (audience claps) ... fundamentally dishonest about it. I find it fascinating that there's a whole parade of Bush-era officials, former CIA director Michael Hayden, Jack Goldsmith who was a lawyer for the White House, who had been very sharp, and I think accurate in their critique of the Obama administration's counterterrorism policy. I take what they say with a grain of salt. Michael Hayden's fond of pointing out that the liberals went after us for warrantless wiretapping and the constitutional law professor president doesn't even seek an indictment against an American who wants to bump someone off in an operation in a country that isn't engaged in shooting at U.S. forces. I do think we are in a time of incredible partisan dishonesty and it doesn't serve the country. I've never gotten more hate mail in my life than I've received under the Obama presidency and it's from liberals. I get called a terrorist sympathizer almost every day, or a simplistic view that if you have a criticism of a democratic president therefore you want the republicans to win. I'm not a democrat or a republican, I'm a journalist and I'm going to be the same journalist under democrats or republicans. To use Sarah Palin's phrase I think there was an attempt to put lipstick on a pig with that speech and I think that the president is sincere when he says that civilian deaths are going to haunt him. I don't think he's an evil man in a lair plotting the destruction of the world. But I think he wants to assert the right to bomb in any country that he and his administration through largely secretive processes, determine there be a threat to U.S. persons. Six hundred days after Anwar al-Awlaki was killed, President Obama finally said that the United States did it. There had never been a confirmation other than leaks that the U.S. actually did the drone strikes that killed these four American citizens. Three in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan who is a Pakistani American whose family is living in North Carolina. Jude Mohammed was killed in Pakistan and actually was indicted unlike the other three. And then Anwar al-Awlaki's son and that's the one I find most egregious. Anwar al-Awlaki they admitted directly targeting. But the other three Americans they used the phrase "not specficially targeted." Which is sort of Orwellian. What does that actually mean? It could mean that they were killed in one of these signature strikes where they are looking at patterns of travel or connections--did someone go into a mosque with someone we're watching? Were they with a group of military-age males? I do think that the president owes it to the American people to explain why this teenager was killed and to do it without relying on some bizarrely carefully legalistally phrased term like "not specifically targeted."

Kelly Jane Torrance: When Bush was in power we saw mass demonstrations and people protesting. But this has disappeared during the Obama administration. You mentioned warrantless wiretapping. The Patriot Act was renewed under Obama, under a Democratic Congress. We are just not hearing about this. Why do you think that is? Is it because it's a team town, you are on one team or the other?
Jeremy Scahill: I think that is part of it. I'm one of the few people left of the spectrum that believes that there is a real story with Benghazi and that it should be thoroughly investigated. The U.S. ambassador was butchered. And I don't think we understand the full scope of what happened there. But what has taken place is that this carnival of crazy has taken over and conflated it with the birther stuff and the scary black man who is president narrative. But there is a real story to be investigated there. And a lot of liberals are acting as if it's all just nutty conspiracy theory. This should be investigated. It isn't about whether you are liberal or conservative, democrat or republican. Particularly for journalists, it should be about what is the truth. And I have deep respect for some conservative journalists. I don't like their views of the world but I think they're good journalists. And they have been covering the story in a meaningful deliberate way. And I think that all of us have to back away from this almost obscene cultish partisanship that particularly surrounds this administration, although it's also true when republicans are in power, they fold up the ranks around these people. But to answer your question, Thomas Drake is here who had his career ruined, for blowing the whistle on things that were being done in the name of the American people and with our tax dollars, that he felt was necessary to expose. And they tried to ruin him. And John Kiriakou is in prison right now at a time when Jose Rodriguez, one of the architects of the torture program, is running around on book tour being featured in documentaries and treated as a legitimate member of society. A guy who helped set up the archipelago of black sites. But the tone was set when President Obama said, "We need to look forward and not backward." I'm going to try that the next time I get pulled over for speeding (audience laughs).

Kelly Jane Torrance: I wish we had more journalists that were willing to engage with other journalists no matter what their views, in an adult and intelligent conversation.
Jeremy Scahill: I thought it was fascinated when Medea Benjamin had the audacity to disrupt the president. She was asking questions of the president that are never asked by the White House Press Corp. The elite journalists don't ask those questions. It was a local reporter, Ben Swann, who asked President Obama about the killing of the American teenagers. At all these press conferences, with few exceptions, there are just softballs lobbed at the guy on these issues. And these are life and death issues that should be debated. I'm sure there are people who disagree with things I said in the film. I want to have that debate. I don't want to be talking about Michelle Obama's bangs... It's all chuckles and games when Obama jokes about drone strikes at the correspondents association dinner ... I brought up the Thomas Drake case because I'm against what the Justice Dept did to James Rosen, the seizure of the records of the Associated Press. Our constitutional law professor, Nobel Peace Prize Winning President is overseeing a serious crackdown on whistleblowers and sending chills through the national security reporting community by targeting reporters who are aggressive in their reporting.

Audience Question: Why didn't you discuss Blackwater more in the film especially the connection with JSOC?
Jeremy Scahill: When you are making a film and you don't want it to be ten hours long, a lot of stuff gets left on the cutting room floor. Part of it was that I wanted to shine a light on a different aspect of this; I had spent years of my life on the Blackwater beat and I was quite frankly sick of having them in my life. Part of it is looking at how the Obama administration was continuing some of the core programs of the Bush-Cheney apparatus and how there was very little public outcry over the very same policies being implemented by this White House. I did a lot of reporting on the role of Blackwater under the Obama administration but I don't think it would have been appropriate to use minutes of the film doing it when we had to cut other stuff out that was new and that I hadn't been working on for five years.

Audience Question: What did you discover really had happened in Gardez?
Jeremy Scahill: My FOIA request is now going on its third anniversary of not being replied to for the Gardez raid. I did an omnibus request for all of the documents on it, attempting to see if there were any disciplinary actions taken against the individuals who had done the raid. This was a particularly gruesome raid where pregnant women and an Afghan senior police commander were killed. These things happen all the time in Afghanistan. Someone who is a rival of another family will feed false intelligence to American military or U.S. officials. Maybe they're trying to settle a grudge, maybe they're vying for a position--saying this guy who is a commander is really a terrorist. My understanding from talking to people who wouldn't go on camera is that the Americans had been told that it was a preparation for a suicide bombing or that there were IEDs being manufactured in this compound or cluster of houses. So when the JSOC team went in to do the raid, they believed they were heading into a hostile area and that anything goes. I have a moral problem with that but if you look at how things operate in Afghanistan, that's happening all the time. The difference here is that instead of realizing that they had been fed bad intel and ended up killing all these people and owning it--I don't think any of them would have been court martialed for that. It would have been--we got fed bad intel, someone came out of the house, we thought it was a Taliban guy and wanted to take them out before they took us out. That happens. The difference here is that they actually covered it up and tried to remove their rounds from the scene, and dug bullets out of the women's bodies and then lied--said it was actually an honor killing, or they had stumbled on a Taliban massacre, or portrayed themselves as heroes. My understanding is that nothing actually concrete happened to the men that did that. I think that some of them were reassigned, some were sent back to the U.S., I understand some are still in Afghanistan as operators. We'll see, but hopefully I'll end of up a FOIA request before I croak.

Audience Question: What does the other side think of these issues and why do they think it is justified?
Jeremy Scahill: We give that point of view. The argument that the White House makes to journalists is that the president is pursuing the least bad option available to deal with threats around the world. I know that there are people plotting to blow up airplanes, and plotting to poison water supplies. These things are real. The question for me is: What is the most effective way to address these threats? If you are actually creating more enemies than you are killing terrorists then you should rethink the policy. But I believe that the White House strategy is they want to preempt those actions. If there is even a whiff of a plot around someone they made a determination that it is better to take them out than to let them continue plotting. We call it dirty wars because this White House has effectively convinced a lot of people, particularly liberals that this is a clean way of waging war and that these civilian deaths are actually miniscule in number and that the civilian death toll is widely exaggerated. I don't think they even know who they are killing in many of these cases. Which is why I do think the signature strike policy, the idea that you are going to precategorize military age males in certain regions of Pakistan and Yemen, the two countries where they are doing this, as terrorists, and then posthumously once you kill then, declare that they were actively plotting in some way against the U.S.--we are killing people whose identities we don't know against whom we don't necessarily have any concrete evidence. It's precrime, it's like Minority Report. My response is: Have you actually done an analysis on who you have killed and what the impact of signature strikes have been in the countries you claim to be taking the fight to the terrorists? Are you actually taking the fight to legitimate terrorists or are you creating more enemies through your policy? I think that's a debate we should have in this country.
Audience: Have you asked the administration these questions?
Jeremy Scahill: Yes. I have tried to ask them about specific cases. They will send you their boilerplate answer that is just their talking points on drone strikes in general. There's very little that you can get out of them. They're not going to tell you something worth anything.

Kelly Jane Torrance: Is that part of their strategy, do they think it is easier to kill a bunch of people on the other side of the world that we don't know than to risk another 9/11? Most presidents would consider it embarrassing for something like that to happen on their watch.
Jeremy Scahill: The Republicans would have eaten Barack Obama alive if there was another significant attack on U.S. soil. There were probably political considerations when they were viewing it through the lens of Obama's political legacy. I think, for them, the idea that you can portray it as a smarter war where you're not deploying U.S. troops, where you're using drones and you're targeting individuals in rather lawless parts of the world, there's an attempt to portray it as a smarter, more effective counterterrorism policy that maximizes deaths of terrorists, minimizes civilian deaths, doesn't subject large scale numbers of American soldiers to being killed or maimed on the battlefield. I think that is the perspective. But a part of it is political. To me that is a bit scandalous too, that there are political motivations for the policy.

Audience Question: It sounds like you are opposed to targeted killings. Should the drone program be moved from CIA to the military?
Jeremy Scahill: I do not believe that the U.S. has the right to assassinate people around the globe in the way that's it's been done through both the Bush and Obama administrations. I think terrorism and terrorism plots are crimes and that they should be dealt with as crimes. We rush to militarize our solution to most of our problems in this country. War on crime--we have a paramillitarization of law enforcement, war on drugs--it's being paramilitarized and in some ways militarized. When the Bostom Marathon bombing happened you had calls for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be sent to Guantanamo and treated as an enemy combatant. We get into a mob mentality where we're going to round up the pitchforks and torches and go out and mete out citizens justice against people. And if that's the kind of country we want to be then we should change the way we portray ourselves to the world and say that in certain cases we embrace enthusiastically mob violence or calls for just bumping people off without even having to present evidence against them. The thing about moving the drone program from the CIA to the military is in a way a sort of dog and pony show. The military can conduct operations under Title 50 of the U.S. code. They can conduct covert operations. The real question is if the drone program is going to remain a Title 50 activity meaning that it is covert and the U.S. can deny it or is it going to be clandestine where the planning of the mission will be kept secret and once the action has taken place the U.S. will ultimately own it? There's propaganda going on to imply that the military is going to be more accountable than the CIA. There are other factors at play. My personal belief on the issue of drones is that we focus too much on that one bit of technology. The most devastating strike in terms of civilian deaths that we know of in Yemen was the first missile strike that Obama authorized and it was not a drone strike. It was a cruise missile attack with cluster bombs which are like flying land mines. I think far more people have been killed in non-drone strikes under the Obama presidency than in drone strikes, through night raids, cruise missile attacks, AC130 attacks. People are right to focus in part on the drone issue. If we don't have a real discussion in this country about our views on assassination and the assertion that the U.S. can conduct these operations in any country it pleases, then we're just debating little bits and pieces of the technology and not actually cutting to the heart of the issue which is what do we think is an effective security policy? I think there should be a moratorium on these strikes in the spirit of George Ryan, former governor of Illinois when he implemented a moratorium on the death penalty. It wasn't because he was a flaming member of Amnesty International. It was because DNA evidence was presented to suggest that innocent people were being sentenced to death. When you are in a situation where there are potentially hundreds if not thousands of people who have been killed whose identities we don't know, we haven't had a real debate on the policy. All of us should be discussing this as a nation.
Kelly Jane Torrance: In the past assassination used to be on well known political figures. But now it's people we don't know about. It's hard to get Americans to care.

Audience Question: You've been talking about strikes policy. One thing that came right before Obama's big speech was the codification of all these policies into the playbook which is still classified. One idea is that instead of having strikes against anyone who threatens U.S. interest, that it will be people who threaten U.S. persons. Do you think that this will any effect on how strikes are carried out and do you thnk we will ever see the actual playbook?
Jeremy Scahill: I think the president's speech probably reflects what he wants the policy to be. But when you start to drill down and you look at what military officials are saying about the signature strikes potentially continuing on for a decade plus, the New York Times which has been doing very good reporting on this issue, suggested that the signature strikes are going to continue on for several years, even beyond the drawdown in Afghanistan. The refining of the language to threatening U.S. persons--U.S. persons in theory could have their security threatened in any number of these plots. I think Obama is implementing a doctrine saying that when someone like me is in power, I'll really babysit this issue, and that's okay. But I don't want to leave that as the policy for the next president. So what they've done is institutionalize the assassination program and creating a framework where you can preclear regions or people for being taken out either in drone strikes or raids. I think we're going to look back a decade from now and realize that this administration made possible a continuation of the Bush-Cheney mentality the next time a Republican is in office. I imagine Dick Cheney fly fishing somewhere sort of salivating--even though he pretends to be against Obama, I think he's happy that Obama saved the day for them. Because he did clean it up and continue the program going forward.

Dirty Wars opens on June 7 at Landmark's E Street Cinema.

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