Editorials > De Palma and Producers Tussle Over Redacted Bits in Redacted

Brian De Palma's Redacted gets its title from the military practice of blacking out text for security reasons. And now, the film itself has been redacted for legal reasons by Mark Cuban and Magnolia Pictures.

The film fictionalizes and dramatizes the Al-Mahmudiyah killings that took place outside Baghdad in March 2006. In the actual Al-Mahmudiyah incident, five U.S. soldiers gang-raped and murdered a 14 year old girl, after first killing her parents and younger sister.

Apparently there is a particularly disturbing photo montage at the end of Redacted that has producers worried. De Palma found a number of images on the internet that were never published in the press because they were deemed too graphic or violent. Now Mark Cuban and Magnolia want to redact these images in some way. It sounds as though they are using black bars to hide the worst bits, reportedly both because they don't have the legal right to show these people and also for fear that a family member might see a loved one's mangled corpse (but mainly the legal issue).

In any event, IFC got a video of De Palma verbally duking it out with Magnolia President Eamonn Bowles at the New York Film Festival which went on for a few minutes before producer Jason Kliot got on stage and tried to moderate the whole thing. Watch the video below:

So what's the right answer to this question? Obviously De Palma's intent is to enrage us and make us stop this war, which the black bars will not do. But then there's the wonderful irony of a film called Redacted being redacted, which further proves his point that the media is censoring the war to keep us complacent. Any opinions?