Director of "Scarface" takes on the Iraq war. "Say hello to my leetle movie!"

A US film exposing the ugly reality of the Iraq war seared the big screen at the Venice film festival Friday, with director Brian De Palma saying he hoped it would help end America's military occupation.

"The pictures are what will stop the war," De Palma told a news conference after the showing of the movie, "Redacted".

The feature, which is based on the actual March 2006 rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi schoolgirl by US soldiers who also slaughtered her family, is a reaction to what he sees as sanitised media accounts of the war seen in the United States.

"All the images we (currently) have of our war are completely constructed -- whitewashed, redacted," said De Palma, who is best known for such violent fictions as "Carrie" and "Scarface".

I believe that the only way Americans will learn the truth about the war is through the efforts of these "guerrilla" truth tellers.

It seems that there are very few unvarnished looks at what is being done in our name in Iraq. We see it in some of the videos posted on the Internet by soldiers, but that only demonstrates the kind of gallows humor of people who are confronted with horrible situations every day develop. It is often uncomfortable to watch, and it makes us feel ashamed of our soldiers at times, but it does not really show just how horrible it is over there. But there are much worse things happening that we have not yet been exposed to.

So movies like the one listed above and Ground Truth, or Lions for Lambs, or The War Tapes may start bringing images and ideas to the masses, that up until this point, have been sanitized to the point that they have little, if any, impact.

I know that there are people who will avoid these films like the plague (I am, after all, the guy who flatly refuses to watch the movies "World Trade Center" or "United 93"), but I hope that many people are curious enough to see what the administration desperately does not want them to see to make these films successful. Perhaps then we will see even more truth in a theatre near us, and that might even lead to more truth being revealed on our television sets.

I will save you a seat in the front row.