‘Atonement’ Director Reed Van Dyk on Iraq War Drama Overlapping With Current Iran-U.S. Conflict: “History Repeats”
As director Reed Van Dyk brought his 2003 Iraqi war drama about a U.S. Marine soldier seeking forgiveness from a family he devastated with his actions in a firefight to the Toronto Film Festival, he pointed to parallels 23 years later with the current Iran-U.S. war in the Middle East.
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“One of the things I thought making (Atonement) was that you feel the ripple effect from one small incident, on one day, into all of these lives, as bombs fall and they’re caught up in a war. So many years later, I felt these incidents are just multiplying over and over and over again, in every new conflict,” Van Dyk told a Roy Thomson Hall audience during a post-North American premiere Q&A on Tuesday night.
“That’s left me heavy-hearted. And while the world has changed since I started writing (Atonement), history repeats. And as we were editing, I was reading headlines that brought new context to the movie,” the director added.
Van Dyk’s film adapts a 2012 New Yorker article by Dexter Filkins that centers on Second Lieutenant Lou D’Alessandro (Lu Lobello, in real life) who, during a firefight in the early days of the Iraq invasion, shoots on a convoy of cars entering an intersection and kills three men in the Khachaturian family (Kachadoorian, in real life) as they sought refuge in their home from a bombing of a relative’s home earlier that day.
Over ten years later and back in the United States, D’Alessandro, played by Boyd Holbrook and now suffering from PTSD and panic attacks, seeks out surviving Khachaturian family members living in Glendale, California, and looks to reconcile with them.
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The film’s climactic scenes see D’Alessandro in the family’s home and sitting opposite its matriarch, Mariam Khachatruian, played by Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass. “We as artists specifically have to keep nagging humanity so maybe those who cause these tragedies will stop one day,” Abbass (Palestine 36) told the TIFF Audience.
Kenneth Branagh plays Michael Reid, the New Yorker writer modeled on Dexter Filkins and acting as the go-between, allowing the reconciliation between D’Alessandro and the Katchaturian family survivors. During the Q&A, Branagh said he followed the lead of Filkins in looking to “bear witness” to an act of forgiveness that could possibly include forgetting about tragic events in the past.
“It seemed very clearly on the page and tonight there’s amazing silence in this room, amazing concentration and appreciation, and you feel the completion of the screenplay and the work,” Branagh said.
For Holbrook, as he played a damaged Iraqi war veteran, he told the Toronto fest audience, “I have so much respect for the men and women who serve our country, and being caught up in the fog of war, and coming back home and navigating that on your own, and hitting rock bottom and being shattered from the inside — I just found such a fresh perspective with what this film gave.”
The Toronto Film Festival runs through to Sept. 20.
