PARK CITY, Utah, Jan 24, (Agencies): The bloody frontlines of America’s war in Afghanistan have been transplanted to the Sundance Film Festival thanks to a gripping documentary vying for honors here.
“Restrepo,” is a visceral account of a year spent embedded alongside 15 American soldiers stationed at a remote mountain outpost in the Korengal Valley, where Taleban attacks are almost a daily occurrence.
Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s film is an intimate portrait of soldiers at war, capturing the chaos of battle, the spartan living conditions and the boredom of moments when the bullets aren’t flying.
While accounts from journalists embedding with US forces are nothing new, few reporters or film-makers have spent an entire year-long rotation with a unit as Junger and Hetherington did between 2007 and 2008.
“Actually no journalist has done that, not for an entire deployment,” said Hetherington, a photographer who won the World Press Photo Competition in 2007 for his picture of an exhausted soldier following a battle in Korengal.
“We just did something very obvious, and we decided to spend a very long time with them, as much as we could,” he told AFP.
“There are 22 million American families with sons or brothers or husbands that have served or are serving in the military and they want to know what those people go through. This film shows it.”
Junger, a regular contributor to Vanity Fair magazine and best-selling author of “The Perfect Storm,” said the idea of the film “was to make a movie that was completely about the soldiers’ experience.”
“They can’t ask a general, ‘Why are we in the Korengal Valley, Sir?’ So we did not interview generals. They can’t talk to politicians, they can’t see their families so we didn’t do any of that in the movie,” Junger explained.
“We didn’t even want an outside narrator.”
The only voices in the film are those of the soldiers, 24/7. “They let us into their lives and they accepted the fact that we would film everything and they never hid anything from us,” Hetherington said.
Nothing was off-limits, not even the death early in the documentary of soldier Juan Restrepo, whom the base the troops are defending is named after.
Despite the extreme danger of the conditions, Junger and Hetherington kept the cameras rolling at all times.
“I only turned the camera off once, in the outpost, when a guy started crying, talking about a friend of his who had been killed,” Junger said.
Footage from life at their rugged mountain encampment in Afghanistan is inter-cut with a series of moving interviews conducted with the soldiers near their base in Vicenza, Italy, two months after their deployment ended.
“We were shocked by the power of the interviews,” Junger said. “What happened is that the most emotionally powerful moments that we had with them actually did not happen in this remote hilltop, but in the studio in Vicenza.
“Because the deployment was over now they were able to go to places emotionally they couldn’t afford to in combat. And the result made the movie.”
The young soldiers at the heart of the film “all risk their lives and sometimes give their lives for other men they love,” Junger explained.
“That’s a connection you don’t find in civilian life and it’s a powerful thing. And I think some of them actually sort of miss that.”
“Many of those guys see the war as some kind of rite of passage,” added Hetherington. “But they are not prepared for the loss of innocence.”

Escobar
The anguished son of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar has reached out to the victims of his murderous father in a compelling documentary being screened at the Sundance Film Festival.
Over the years Sebastian Marroquin — formerly Juan Pablo Escobar — has rejected dozens of offers from Hollywood to help tell the story of his notorious late father, gunned down by police in 1993.
But Marroquin, who changed his name and relocated to Buenos Aires to start a new life, has finally spoken out in “Sins of My Father”, Nicolas Entel’s powerful entry to Sundance’s World Documentary Competition.
“A producer friend in Colombia suggested making a documentary about Pablo Escobar,” Argentine film-maker Entel told AFP.
“I was looking to do something new, from a different point of view and it was then that I had the idea of telling the story through Escobar’s only son.
“I spent six months trying to convince him to take part. He had already turned down more than 50 offers because most of them wanted to exploit the name Escobar and glamorize the life of a gangster.”
Juan Pablo Escobar was 16 when he decided — shortly after the bloody death of his father — to change his name and move to Argentina with his mother.
Now a 30-something architect, Marroquin appears in the film as a tormented soul, torn between feeling love for the man he once knew as his father and disgust at the horrific crimes he committed, which included ordering the murders of several thousand people according to some estimates.
If Marroquin appears calm, “it’s because he has lost the right to be angry,” Entel told AFP.
“If you play a dirty trick on me and I say ‘I’m going to kill you’, you know it’s a figure of speech,” Entel said. “If Sebastian says something like that then he knows that tomorrow the newspapers are going to say that the son of Pablo Escobar threatened to kill someone.”

Theater alternate
Here’s a plot twist worthy of any Hollywood movie. To save independent films from extinction, the time may be near for some low-budget movies to play outside theaters, instead of in them.
The idea — alternative distribution of movies via video-on-demand on cable and satellite television systems and the Internet — is what some “indie” players at this week’s major industry event, the Sundance Film Festival, are backing.
The low-budget film arena that produced movies like Oscar-winner “Slumdog Millionaire,” has struggled through hard times as low-cost digital equipment and an influx of investors fueled a glut of films at the onset of a recession.
Backers of on-demand releases say alternative distribution presents ways for low-budget filmmakers to profit without having to compete for limited space in movie theaters.
To promote the idea, Sundance is releasing three films, including Michael Winterbottom documentary “The Shock Doctrine,” on demand via a new program it calls Sundance Selects. Five more films will be on YouTube.
“The beauty of this (video-on-demand) model is that you take a lot of the voodoo economics of film distribution out of the equation,” said Jonathan Sehring, president of IFC Entertainment, who is working with Sundance.
Traditionally, a distributor pays a producer a fee to release a film, often forking over less than the production cost and promising the filmmaker a share of profits that may never be realized if a movie fails at box offices.
Utilizing TV on-demand or Web downloads, indie movies can closely target audiences and avoid millions of dollars spent to market a film in theaters, proponents say. Some filmmakers like it because their movies get seen, and distributors hope for new customers outside traditional art houses in major cities.

Gates
When Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the richest man in the United States, came to the Sundance Film Festival here this week, it wasn’t movies on his mind, it was education — your kids’ education.
A new documentary, “Waiting For Superman,’’ by director Davis Guggenheim (‘’An Inconvenient Truth’’) looks at what Gates and Guggenheim say is a US public school system in shambles.
“The quality of our educational system is what made America great. Now it’s not as good as it was, and it needs to be a lot better,’’ Gates told Reuters after the film’s premiere Friday.
“Many of these high schools are terrible, and this film, ‘Waiting for Superman’ by Davis Guggenheim, which I have a very minor part in, tells this story in a brilliant way,’’ he said.
If that last part makes Gates sound like a movie pitchman — he got the title of the film, its Oscar-winning director and ‘’brilliant’’ in the same sentence — he knows it, and he’s not ashamed.
“Well, I used to try and sell software,’’ Gates said with a laugh, when told he sounded very Hollywood. “We sold a few, so now I got to give it (the money) all away.’’