{"id":626118,"date":"2026-09-16T05:50:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T05:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/626118\/"},"modified":"2026-09-16T05:50:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T05:50:12","slug":"atonement-director-on-iraq-war-drama-overlapping-with-iran-u-s-conflict","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/626118\/","title":{"rendered":"Atonement Director on Iraq War Drama Overlapping With Iran-U.S. Conflict"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAs 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<\/a>, he pointed to parallels 23 years later with the current Iran-U.S. war in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOne 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\u2019re 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,\u201d Van Dyk told a Roy Thomson Hall audience during a post-North American premiere Q&A on Tuesday night.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat\u2019s 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,\u201d the director added.<\/p>\n

\n\tVan Dyk\u2019s film adapts a 2012 New Yorker article by Dexter Filkins that centers on Second Lieutenant Lou D\u2019Alessandro (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\u2019s home earlier that day.<\/p>\n

\n\tOver ten years later and back in the United States, D\u2019Alessandro, played by Boyd Holbrook<\/a> and now suffering from PTSD and panic attacks, seeks out surviving Khachaturian family members living in Glendale, California, and looks to reconcile with them.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film\u2019s climactic scenes see D\u2019Alessandro in the family\u2019s home and sitting opposite its matriarch, Mariam Khachatruian, played by Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass. \u201cWe as artists specifically have to keep nagging humanity so maybe those who cause these tragedies will stop one day,\u201d Abbass (Palestine 36) told the TIFF Audience.<\/p>\n

\n\tKenneth Branagh<\/a> plays Michael Reid, the New Yorker writer modeled on Dexter Filkins and acting as the go-between, allowing the reconciliation between D\u2019Alessandro and the Katchaturian family survivors. During the Q&A, Branagh said he followed the lead of Filkins in looking to \u201cbear witness\u201d to an act of forgiveness that could possibly include forgetting about tragic events in the past.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt seemed very clearly on the page and tonight there\u2019s amazing silence in this room, amazing concentration and appreciation, and you feel the completion of the screenplay and the work,\u201d Branagh said.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor Holbrook, as he played a damaged Iraqi war veteran, he told the Toronto fest audience, \u201cI 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 \u2014 I just found such a fresh perspective with what this film gave.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Toronto Film Festival runs through to Sept. 20.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As director Reed Van Dyk brought his 2003 Iraqi war drama about a U.S. Marine soldier seeking forgiveness…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":626119,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[195540,93,61,60,86223,270,1998],"class_list":["post-626118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-boyd-holbrook","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-kenneth-branagh","tag-movies","tag-toronto-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/626119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}