Documentary film searches for truth in Abu Ghraib
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Errol Morris' new film about the torture and humiliations that riddled Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison asks questions that cannot be easily answered -- Why do ordinary people do evil things and can you believe the photographic images that you see?
For the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, these are questions that have dominated his waking hours for two years.
The result is his film on the prison scandal, "Standard Operating Procedure," which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York on Thursday.
The movie begins its roll-out to U.S. theaters this week, but Morris thinks he may have a problem on his hands.
"This is a story I had to tell, but I don't think anyone is going to see it," he told Reuters.
In fact, Iraq war movies have bombed at box offices. Last year's "In the Valley of Elah" took in just under $7 million at box offices. "Stop-Loss," which is still in theaters, has made about $11 million.
However, war-themed documentaries, like Oscar-winning "Taxi to the Dark Side," have been critical hits. "Standard Operating Procedure" was honored earlier this year with the runner-up jury grand prix award at the Berlin Film Festival.
Morris, who won an Oscar for his documentary "Fog of War," about how U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara got the country deep into the Vietnam War, also has written a book on Abu Ghraib with Philip Gourevitch.
He has thousands of photos to post online. Many, he said, are more horrific than those that stunned the world in 2004.
INDELIBLE IMAGES
The images are indelible: a naked man on a leash held by a grinning 20-year-old woman soldier, a naked man with panties on his head strapped to his bed and seven Iraqi prisoners stripped and posed in a human pyramid.
Morris argues that the torture and humiliations inflicted on the Iraqis at Abu Ghraib were standard operating procedure ordered by military chiefs and left to the grunts to enforce.
His film tells the stories of five lower-tier soldiers prosecuted for crimes at Abu Ghraib, including Lynndie England, the woman who held the leash. She was sentenced to three years in prison in September 2005.
In the film, England tells of posing for the picture to please her military policeman boyfriend and of living in a world turned upside down -- a prison under daily siege where inmates outnumbered guards, food was scarce and fear dominated the landscape.
Morris said the picture lied. England was not the devil incarnate, he said, just a girl next door caught up in circumstances beyond her control, as was Sabrina Harman who took many of the photos that created the scandal.
In one, Harman appears grinning next to the body of a man who died during interrogation by CIA agents inside the prison.
"You start to look into why this photo was posed and you find out that he was killed by the CIA and that others tried to sneak out his body. Sabrina sneaks in and takes pictures that in a different set of circumstances would have won a Pulitzer ... Her crime was embarrassing the military. Without her photos we would have known nothing of this crime," Morris said.
Morris added that his job was to make sense of the photographs and to show how ordinary people were pressed into abusing others by a chain of command.
"The photographs both reveal and conceal," Morris said.
As for the filmmaker, show business newspaper The Hollywood Reporter recently reported his next film would be a comedy. He declined to detail it, but did say there would be comedy in it. Even Errol Morris needs to smile sometimes.
(Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)
