By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
The Times on Winter Soldier, "this ancient, grainy documentary"
Milestone Films gets a long write-up in the NY TImes about their new doc project, with a dramatic lede from David M. Halbfinger: “Like a live hand grenade brought home from a distant battlefield, the 34-year-old antiwar documentary Winter Soldier has been handled for decades as if it could explode at any moment. Now, the 95-minute film—which has circulated like 16mm samizdat on college campuses for decades but has never been accessible to a wide audience—is about to get its first significant theatrical release… Its distributors say that the war in Iraq has made the Vietnam-era film as powerful as when it was new, and its filmmakers [call] it eerily prescient of national embarrassments like the torture at Abu Ghraib… When one of the veterans—John Kerry… seen on screen for less than a minute—ran for president… [it] turned up as propaganda on both sides… Mr. Kerry’s friend… George Butler used footage… to lionize him in a biographical film… called Going Upriver. His political enemies on the right, meanwhile, created a Web site… and made a film of their own… to assail him as a traitor and a fraud…. “The context is why we wanted to do it,” said Amy Heller, co-owner with her husband, Dennis Doros, of Milestone Films… “We have a 9-year-old son… but if he were 19 and wondering what he should do with the next stage of his life, I sure would want him to see this film before considering going into the military.” [More explicit description of the disturbing content of “this grainy, ancient documentary” at the link.]