Dear War Tapes Community:

Today is the big day for The War Tapes! We open at the Sunshine Theatre and need to show movie theatres across country that people want to see what Owen Gleiberman, of ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, calls "the first indispensable Iraq documentary". Please come see the film this weekend at the Sunshine Theater and bring your posse.

As an added bonus, there are two special War Tapes meetups after today's 5:20pm and 7:35pm shows. Come meet cameraman Sgt Zack Bazzi and director Deborah Scranton at the bar d.b.a, around the corner from the Sunshine Theatre. We'll be at d.b.a. from 7pm until at least 10pm.

So come see the movie and see us right after! For directions on how to get from Sunshine to d.b.a., which is about 2 minute walk, click here.

The War Tapes has been getting amazing reviews from many, many outlets, and Deborah, Zack, Mike, and Steve have been running from interview to interview all week. We're trying to get our hands on some of the great TV pieces from MSNBC, CNN, and FOX, but for now check out this great interview from NPR's Fresh Air and this Movie Minute piece at the New York Times.

Also, take a look at these three reviews from New York based papers:
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New York Times' A.O. Scott had this to say: The film that the men shot, supplemented by home-front interviews and images captured by other soldiers, has been edited into a moving, complicated movie that illuminates, with heartbreaking clarity, some of the human actuality of this long, confusing war.

Like Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's "Gunner Palace," released last year, and James Longley's "Iraq in Fragments," shown at Sundance in January, "The War Tapes" declines to argue a position, preferring to concentrate on the fine grain of daily life in combat. Whatever your opinion of the war -- and however it has changed over the years -- this movie is sure to challenge your thinking and disturb your composure. It provides no reassurance, no euphemism, no closure. Given the subject and the circumstances, how could it?

By the end of "The War Tapes," which was directed by Deborah Scranton, you feel remarkably close to the three guardsmen, who represent themselves with a candor occasionally checked by flinty New England reticence. Specialist Mike Moriarty, at 34 the oldest of them, describes himself as a super-patriot and says he was eager to go to Iraq to exact some payback for the 9/11 attacks. By the time he returns home to his wife, two young children and a blue-collar job, his views have changed a little. While his support for the war has not wavered, he notes that he hated every minute he spent in Iraq and would not go back "if they paid me half a million dollars."

...

"The War Tapes," like most movies of its kind, acknowledges the enormous gap separating those who fight from those who stay home. In some ways the most painful scenes take place after the guardsmen come back and try to negotiate the transition from the grim, violent deserts of Iraq to the comforts and irritations of ordinary American life.

No one else can comprehend what they've been through, certainly not the audience members, who will at least try. Specialist Moriarty complains that nobody really wants to hear his stories, even though someone will occasionally express some polite curiosity. And Sergeant Pink, drinking beer with his girlfriend, muses that people don't really know what to say to him, and that there's nothing they can say that he really wants to hear. But then on second thought, and with some prompting, he admits that there is one sentence he doesn't mind hearing: "I'm glad you're home."

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New York Press:

The footage is galvanizing. There are close-ups of the guardsmen philosophizing into the camera, and what they say is surprisingly and always--yes, always--engaging.

Many of the images aren't pretty: blood stains in the sand, bits of charred flesh, explosions, gunfire exchanges, bombed out buildings. You don't see any American injured or dead, but at one point there are shouts that Sergeant Smith is down, and it's quite disturbing that you never do find out what happened to him.

Meeting Steve's girlfriend, Mike's wife and Zack's mom--in interviews conducted outside the embedded video framework--adds emotional depth. Steve James and Leslie Simmer's artful editing adds impact. For example: There's a camera pan of silhouettes of dead bodies slumped against a barbed wire fence, then a cut to a hand playfully creating a shadow animal against the sand.

Ultimately, the film presents a balanced point of view. The guardsmen and their loved ones are suffering from having been a part of the war, but they don't disapprove of it--although they come to think that it's really all about oil and making money rather than putting an end to terrorism. Their observations are honest, challenging and in your face: plenty of ammunition so that you can take a shot at making up your own mind about Operation Iraqi Freedom.

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New York Newsday (gave it 4 out of 4 stars!):

Deborah Scranton's upsetting Iraqi diary "The War Tapes" is the apex of two converging movements in documentary filmmaking: the chronicles of a war that shows no signs of going away and movies that saddle participants with the responsibility of recording the event at hand themselves.

The thinking behind this latter concept, presumably, is that everyone has a Michael Moore inside them just waiting to get out, and that no one is better qualified to document a barrel ride off Niagara Falls than the person screaming his way through it. This experiment in artistic buck-passing has resulted in the negligible (the blinding rock show footage shot by concertgoers in "The Beastie Boys: I Shot That!") and the substantial (the eloquent photographs taken by the children of Calcutta prostitutes in "Born into Brothels").

The concept delivers tenfold for sheer authenticity and immediacy in "The War Tapes," which telescopes a year of Operation Iraqi Freedom through the lenses of three National Guardsmen who agreed to film their experiences from Fort Dix to battle and back home again.

How does one shoot a war and shoot a rifle at the same time? Hard to say, but Scranton's uniformed cameramen give us an insider's perspective that transcends the mediated realism of "Saving Private Ryan" or the evening news. A soldier's camera bounces and ducks from the agitated insides of a Hummer as it plows through a hail of bullets or races toward the surprise clouds of car bombs detonating a few yards away. An incinerated body slumps from a shredded vehicle. A voice shouts "Sgt. Smith is down! Sgt. Smith is down!"
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After you see the movie, don't forget to stop by the blog and let us know what you think.

Sincerely,

Deborah and the entire War Tapes team

SenArt Films, Fifth Floor, 133 West Broadway, New York NY 10013