De Palma Wins with Shock and Awe

Veteran US director Brian De Palma won the Best Director award at the Venice film festival on Saturday for "Redacted," his hard-hitting Iraq war film.

The dramatisation of the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl by US soldiers, was also honoured on Friday with the Future Film Festival Digital Award, for the film that makes the best use of animation or visual effects.

De Palma, who is best known for such violent fictions as the psychic thriller "Carrie" and the gangster movie "Scarface" (1983), turns 67 on Tuesday.

The film exposing the ugly reality of the Iraq war seared the big screen at the Venice film festival Friday, with director Brian De Palma saying he hoped it would help end America's military occupation.

"The pictures are what will stop the war," De Palma told a news conference after the showing of the movie.

"Redacted," which is based on the actual March 2006 rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi schoolgirl by US soldiers who also slaughtered her family, is a reaction to what he sees as sanitised media accounts of the war seen in the United States.

"All the images we (currently) have of our war are completely constructed -- whitewashed, redacted," said De Palma.

"One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to get their congressmen to vote against the war," he added.

De Palma, whose 1989 "Casualties of War" about the Vietnam War also deals with the gang rape and murder of a young civilian girl, responded with "that's a good question" when asked why the United States seems unable to learn from its mistakes.

"Redacted" hits hard with its dramatic reenactment of the conditions, attitudes and stresses that led up to the real-life crime.

One of the soldiers involved, Private First Class Jesse Spielman, was in early August sentenced to 110 years in prison for his role in the rape and killings.

Shown through the imaginary video lens of one of the soldiers involved in the raid on the girl's home, De Palma's dramatisation is interlaced with actual news clips, documentary footage and stills from the war.

The decision to use the device of the videocam arose from De Palma's research on the Internet. "The blogs, the use of language, it's all there," he said.

He explained that legal obstacles in dealing with real people and events meant he was "forced to fictionalise things" to get the movie made.

"Redacted" will initially be distributed nationwide by Magnolia Pictures as a "classic art film," its producer Jason Kliot said. "If the response is strong one hopes the distribution will grow the film in a big way."

With a career spanning more than four decades, the prolific De Palma has never been tied to a particular genre, creating anything from thrillers such as "Mission: Impossible" to documentaries, comedies, and sci-fi flicks, breaking into bankability with "Greetings" (1968) for which he won a Silver Bear in Berlin.