By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

OSCILLOSCOPE PICKS UP AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY “THE KILL TEAM”

Posted Tuesday, August 20th, 2013 - Comments Off on OSCILLOSCOPE PICKS UP AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY “THE KILL TEAM”
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(New York, NY) August 20, 2013—Oscilloscope Laboratories announced today that it has acquired North American rights to Academy Award-nominated director Dan Krauss’ powerful and incendiary documentary THE KILL TEAM.  THE KILL TEAM premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival to widespread critical acclaim, and won the festival’s Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary. The film has also screened at HotDocs, AFI Docs, and the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it picked up yet another jury prize. Oscilloscope will release the film in 2014.
Equal parts infuriating and illuminating, THE KILL TEAM looks at the devastating moral tensions that tear at soldiers’ psyches through the lens of one highly personal and emotional story. Private Adam Winfield was a 21-year-old soldier in Afghanistan when he attempted with the help of his father to alert the military to heinous war crimes his platoon was committing. But Winfield’s pleas went unheeded. Left on his own and with threats to his life, Private Winfield was himself drawn into the moral abyss, forced to make a split-second decision that would change his life forever.
With extraordinary access to the key individuals involved in the case – including Private Winfield, his passionately supportive parents, and Winfield’s startlingly candid compatriots in the so-called “Kill Team”— Krauss expertly constructs a film that is a balanced and nuanced look at the personal stories so often lost inside the larger coverage of the longest war in US history.
About the acquisition, O-scope’s David Laub and Dan Berger said, “THE KILL TEAM is an extraordinarily powerful and brave film.  It perfectly balances the political with the personal, and is one of the most honest, heartbreaking, and important documentaries we have ever seen.  We are extremely proud to be behind this film and to be bringing this absolutely essential story to a wider audience.”
Filmmaker Dan Krauss said, “Oscilloscope is an amazing curator of films that grab you emotionally and then make you think. To have THE KILL TEAM become a part of this tradition is an extraordinary honor.”
The creative team includes executive producers Julie Goldman of Motto Pictures and Deborah Hoffman and producer Linda Davis.
 
About Oscilloscope Laboratories
Oscilloscope Laboratories is a film production and theatrical distribution entity launched in 2008 by Adam Yauch of Beastie Boys. Yauch modeled the company after the indie record labels he grew up around, choosing films and then releasing them with the same artistic integrity with which they were made.  The company, which is an extension of Yauch’s recording studio of the same name, has an in-house DVD distribution and production arm, and its paper packaging is reminiscent of the heyday of LP record jackets. All of the company’s plastic-free DVD packaging is printed on FSC Certified 80% post-consumer waste paper and produced in a carbon-neutral hydroelectric plant.  Previous and current releases include Lynne Ramsay’s Golden Globe® Nominated WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN starring Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, and Ezra Miller; Marshall Curry’s Oscar-nominated documentary IF A TREE FALLS: A STORY OF THE EARTH LIBERATION FRONT; Oren Moverman’s Oscar-nominated THE MESSENGER starring Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson and Samantha Morton; Kelly Reichardt’s MEEK’S CUTOFF starring Michelle Williams; Evan Glodell’s Sundance hit BELLFLOWER; Kelly Reichardt’s WENDY & LUCY starring Michelle Williams; Anders Østergaard’s Oscar-nominated documentary BURMA VJ; Kurt Keunne’s acclaimed documentary DEAR ZACHARY; Bradley Rust Gray’s THE EXPLODING GIRL starring Zoe Kazan; Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s Oscar-nominated documentary THE GARDEN; Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s LCD Soundsystem documentary SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS; Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson’s SAMSARA; Andrea Arnold’s WUTHERING HEIGHTS, Matt Ross’s 28 HOTEL ROOMS, and the acclaimed documentaries TCHOUPITOULAS by Bill and Turner Ross and ONLY THE YOUNG by Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims, Keith Miller’s Slamdance Grand Prize Winner WELCOME TO PINE HILL,  Matteo Garrone’s Cannes Grand Prix-winner REALITY, Todd Berger’s IT’S A DISASTER, starring David Cross, Julia Stiles, and America Ferrara; Victor Quinaz’s BREAKUP AT A WEDDING and Rowan Athale’s WASTELAND.  Upcoming releases include Hannah Fidell’s A TEACHER, Andrew Dosunmu’s Sundance-winning MOTHER OF GEORGE, Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq’s THESE BIRDS WALK, Martha Shane and Lana Wilson’s AFTER TILLER, Lotfy Nathan’s 12 O’CLOCK BOYS, Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais’ WHITEWASH, Sam Fleischner’s STAND CLEAR OF THE CLOSING DOORS and Matt Wolf’s TEENAGE.
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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon