Battle for Haditha
| Battle for Haditha | |
|---|---|
Film poster
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| Directed by | Nick Broomfield |
| Produced by | Nick Broomfield |
| Written by | Nick Broomfield Marc Hoeferlin Anna Telford |
| Starring |
Elliot Ruiz Yasmine Hanani Matthew Knoll |
| Music by | Nick Laird-Clowes |
| Cinematography | Mark Wolf |
| Edited by |
Stuart Gazzard Ash Jenkins |
| Distributed by | HanWay Films |
|
Release date
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Spain: 14 December 2007 United Kingdom: 4 February 2008 |
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Running time
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93 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English Arabic |
| Box office | $245,521 |
Battle for Haditha is a 2007 drama film directed by British director Nick Broomfield based on the Haditha killings. Dramatising real events using a documentary style, Battle for Haditha is Broomfield's follow up to Ghosts. The film was aired on Channel 4 in the UK on 17 March 2008.
The film is inspired by the Haditha killings incident that occurred three months after the Battle of Haditha in the Iraq War. On 19 November 2005, 24 unarmed Iraqi men, women and children were killed following an incident where an I.E.D killed one marine and seriously wounded two others and were killed by a group of United States Marines in Haditha, a city in the western Iraq province of Al Anbar. Since the release of the film, however, the US military justice controversially dropped all charges to all Marines involved. The names of the involved parties have been changed in the film.
Shot in Jerash, Jordan, the film uses former US Military personnel and Iraqi refugees to play many of the roles. However, the film was shot in an unconventional way – it was shot sequentially enabling the cast to build their characters as the story progressed. It also used real locations, and a very small documentary style film crew. This greatly added to the feeling of reality. Actors, while working from a detailed script, and the final form of the film reflects that structure, were also able to improvise and add to the dialogue, making it their own.
The film features Elliot Ruiz as Cpl Ramirez, a Marine who loses his composure after watching a friend die, Andrew McLaren as Captain Sampson the tough company commander in Charge of Cpl Ramirez, Jase Willette as PFC Cuthbert, the young Marine whose death sets off the chain of events, Yasmine Hanani as Hiba, a young Iraqi woman stuck in the middle of the chaos, Eric Mehalacopoulos as the no-nonsense Sgt Ross, Nathan Delacruz a former United States Marine plays Cpl Marcus with his infamous comical one liners Falah Flayla as a former Iraqi Army officer turned insurgent, and Thomas Hennessy Jr. as a Navy corpsman assigned to Kilo company.
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