31 January 2011 - On Saturday, Robert Redford and Ellen Barkin joined director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Fair Game) and an all-star cast at Sundance Film Festival to perform “Reckoning With Torture: Memos and Testimonies From the 'War on Terror.'" The event, presented by the American Civil Liberties Union, PEN American Center and Sundance, featured readings of formerly secret government documents. The production was filmed for a documentary Liman is directing to raise awareness of the scope and human cost of the United States’ post-9/11 torture program.
Redford and Barkin joined actor America Ferrera; writers Sandra Cisneros, Annie Proulx, Marilynne Robinson, Esmeralda Santiago, George Saunders and Naomi Wolf; documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney; former interrogation insiders Jack Rice and Matthew Alexander; and other surprise guests to perform the readings. The texts are drawn largely from over 150,000 pages of formerly classified government documents obtained by the ACLU in a lawsuit that the New York Times has called “among the most successful in the history of public disclosure”; they include secret legal memos that sought to justify torture, e-mails written by FBI agents who witnessed torture at Guantánamo, interrogation logs, transcripts of military tribunal proceedings and moving statements and affidavits by U.S servicemen and women who objected to the abusive interrogations. {continued}
I am here in Park City, Utah, for my first encounter with the Sundance Festival; I had expected starlets in ski boots and parties in which people said 'Darling' and perhaps many worthy little films with artistic merit, but -- my mistake, probably due to the grudging reluctance on the part of print journalists like myself to yield respect to a medium that seems to get all the glamor and sometimes go an inch deep -- I had not expected subversion, analysis or, even, revolutionary ideas.
But thirty-six hours into Sundance at the time of this writing, I have to say: we seem at one of the few nexuses left in the US for brave journalistic critical thinking. Sundance this year is packed with substance, and documentarians especially are tacking head-on issue that US print journalists, especially those who work for corporate-owned media, have abashedly refused to tackle. The two main themes in the festival -- to my amazement, given that the mainstream pop-culture world seems to have dismissed feminism and closed its eyes to threats to freedom -- seem to be gender rebellion -- and civil liberties.
I am here as part of an event put together by PEN -- the organization that defends writers' freedom of expression -- and the ACLU: on Saturday we staged 'Reckoning with Torture', an ensemble piece based on real documents related to US torture that the ACLU acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request. The parts were read by a lineup of writers and film actors, including Sandra Cisneros, Annie Proulx, and America Ferrera. A former US military interrogator and former CIA agent, Jack Rice, read with us as well. The piece was directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Fair Game). I am pleased to say I read the part of George Bush. {continued}
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