General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Redacted

Redacted is a 2007 American war drama written and directed by Brian De Palma, presented as a collage of fictional documentary footage: a soldier's video diary, a French documentary crew's recordings, television news, security-camera video, blogs, and webcam chats. It is a fictionalized account of a real 2006 war crime in which United States soldiers raped and murdered a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and killed members of her family in Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad.¹^•² The title refers to the military and publishing term for editing or censoring a document, and to De Palma's argument that the true story of the Iraq War had been "redacted from the Main Stream Corporate Media."³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Brian De Palma, who also wrote the screenplay¹
Release	Limited theatrical release November 16, 2007; distributed by Magnolia Pictures¹
Basis	The March 2006 rape and murder of 14-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi and the killing of her family in Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad⁴
Budget and shooting	Made for under $5 million and shot in Jordan⁵
Runtime and rating	90 minutes, rated R for rape, pervasive language, some sexual references/images, and strong disturbing violence¹
Honors	Silver Lion for Best Director and the Future Film Festival Digital Award at the 2007 Venice Film Festival; Golden Lion nominee⁶
Reception	44% Tomatometer from 109 reviews; US gross of $65.1K¹

Spoilers

Form and story

De Palma came to the film's structure through research. He was approached by HDNet to make one of its $5 million movies on any subject, with the requirement that it be shot in high definition; while researching the incident online he found the forms in which people were expressing themselves about the war, and that became the shape of the movie.⁸ The result is a fragmented mock-documentary with nine or ten distinct narrative elements, each with its own texture: a video diary kept by Private Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), who hopes his footage will be his ticket into film school; a solemn documentary on the US role in Iraq credited to two fictitious French intellectuals; two newsreels, one in Arabic and one in English; CCTV footage; official army tapes made by a psychiatrist and military lawyers; propaganda films shot for insurgent websites, including a hostage execution; video messages between soldiers and their families; and blog material.¹⁰^•¹¹

The soldiers of the unit manning the Samarra checkpoint include the bookish Gabe Blix (Kel O'Neill), the group's conscience Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney), the country boy Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman), Master Sergeant Sweet (Ty Jones), and the volatile Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll).¹¹^•¹ The plot follows a causal chain: the soldiers open fire on a speeding car at a checkpoint, killing a pregnant woman; their sergeant is killed by an explosive device, apparently in retribution; and in a night-time raid the soldiers rape a teenage girl and murder her and her family.¹² Salazar films the criminal act, and the film's aftermath includes his capture and beheading in insurgent-originated video.¹³

Central to the design is the idea that fragmented footage from different sources may show what happened while raising questions about the context and reasoning of the event itself.¹³ The film's stated point is that in today's wars, modern communication techniques make more uncensored video material available than is accounted for in reality.¹⁴

The real incident

The film is based on an attack that took place in March 2006 in Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad, in which US soldiers gang-raped, killed, and burned Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi, a 14-year-old girl; her parents and another family member were also killed.⁴ De Palma said he learned of the incident through the internet, in blogs, YouTube postings, and American and Arab sites, and that the soldiers involved were still being prosecuted while he was making the film.⁷^•⁸ Because the real case was too close to the events, his lawyers told him he could not use real material, and he was forced to fictionalize everything.⁸

The film's opening text states that it is "entirely fictional, inspired by an incident widely reported to have occurred in Iraq," and that it "visually documents imagined events before, during and after a 2006 rape and murder in Samarra."⁹ The setting was moved to Samarra, which allows one soldier to read John O'Hara's novel Appointment in Samarra.¹⁰

The redaction controversy

The film ends with a montage of real photographs of dead and wounded Iraqis, and the film's own release became an instance of its subject: the studios insisted that the subjects' eyes and identifying features be blacked out.² De Palma raised the issue at the New York Film Festival, saying, "The irony of all this is that even though everyone (in Iraq) has a digital camera and access to the Internet, somehow we don't see any of these images... why are things being redacted? My own film was redacted."¹⁵ Magnolia Pictures cited legal and financial concerns; producer Mark Cuban's company said it could not insure the film if it ran the unedited photos, which were too graphic for mainstream newspapers or television.¹⁵^•⁴ De Palma said he was shocked at his own lack of editorial control and blamed insurance companies for exercising too much control over distribution.⁴

The film also drew political criticism. Bill O'Reilly called De Palma "a true villain in our country" and suggested the movie could lead to the deaths of American troops; the Guardian reported that it attracted abusive internet messages, many charging the director with treason, than it had sold tickets in American cinemas.¹⁵^•¹⁰

Reception

Critical response was divided. Rotten Tomatoes recorded a 44% Tomatometer from 109 reviews and a 45% audience score, with a critics' consensus that the film "suffers from stereotypical characters and a forced faux-doc style" despite De Palma's commitment to the material.¹ Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called the soldiers' performances fake, mannered, and contrived, and wrote that the crude representation insulted the reality it tried to recapture.³ The Washington Post's Desson Thomson judged that the film added nothing to what documentaries and the internet had already shown.¹⁶ Roger Ebert gave the film a positive review, arguing that the edge of inauthentic performance paradoxically increased the effect, since moments seemed more real because they were not acted flawlessly.⁷ Philip French, writing in the Observer, called it "a brave and provocative film" but a lesser work than Casualties of War.¹⁰

At the box office the film earned $65.1K in the United States.¹ It nonetheless received festival recognition: at Venice in 2007 De Palma won the Silver Lion for Best Director and the Future Film Festival Digital Award, and the film was nominated for the Golden Lion; it later won a Women Film Critics Circle award and a Cahiers du Cinéma Top 10 Film award.⁶

Relation to Casualties of War

Redacted revisits the territory of De Palma's 1989 Vietnam film Casualties of War, which centers on the rape of a young Vietnamese woman by American soldiers; the Guardian called Casualties of War one of the finest films about the American experience of the Vietnam War.¹⁰^•³ The two films share a three-act structure, psychological doubling of characters, and an anti-war message, and even echo each other's dialogue: in Redacted a bully forces McCoy to repeat "What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas," where Casualties of War had "What happens in the field stays in the field."¹⁰ Scholarly readings argue that Redacted should be viewed as a critique of the conventional Hollywood war film and a form of self-criticism toward the approach taken in Casualties of War, revising the war-film mode to underline the incapacity of earlier war films to convey combat experience after 9/11.¹⁷ Jonathan Romney, reviewing for The Independent, placed it as an update of Casualties of War whose jigsaw quality makes it a rawer and more confrontational work than the Hollywood-polished earlier film.¹⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › War and historical films (individual works) › War action and adventure › War action films released since 2000 › Released 2000 to 2016

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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