2008 Woodie Awards
Weapons of Mass Destruction gets whole story
Whitney Medved
Issue date: 3/28/06 Section: News
- Page 1 of 1
This evening the SMC Republican Club welcomes guest speaker/documentary executive producer Brad Maaske to present his film Weapons of Mass Destruction, at 7:00 p.m., in Galileo 201, which will be followed by a question and answer session. The documentary focuses primarily on Saddam Hussein's notorious rise to dictatorship, his fall, and the steps that are currently being taken to improve the Iraqi political situation. The documentary includes "Never-before-seen footage of chemical attacks, murders and torture leveled against the Kurdish population of Iraq spanning more than two decades," according to the most recent press release provided by the club. Footage of the parents of fallen soldier Daniel Unger will also be shown along with other heroic figures from 9/11. "And you'll even see some interviews of typical anti-war protestors who are perhaps some of the biggest-and stupidest-hypocrites of all," said movie reviewer Jim Bray of technofile.com.
Maaske wasn't always in the documentary making business, before Weapons of Mass Destruction the Colorado native and central California resident was practicing as a successful real estate broker. After September 11 though, he became frustrated with the media, and their lack of coverage of Saddam Hussein's oppressive regime and the effect it was having on the people of the Middle East.
According to the film's website, "The picture of true evil was being hidden from the eyes of America. It was time for a truth-telling counter-offensive." Finally, he resolved to do it himself-to meet real people, get real names, and visit real villages; to discover for himself and finally reveal to others how serious the situation really was. His virtual inexperience in the arena of filmmaking did not stifle him as he charged into the project with an abundance of energy, and ended up finishing the piece in a matter of weeks. His pursuit to get the other side of the story-or rather the whole story, instead of the fragmented, biased sliver that he felt the media was presenting on primetime-led him and his crew everywhere from his own backyard in California, all the way to Iraq. Meetings with Iraqi families, and visits both to the graves of those who had been killed by Hussein and to the orphanages that have been filled by his surviving victims, all added up to create the majority of the substance of the movie. The group was able to conduct interviews with the prosecution team responsible for trying Hussein, and even those working on framing a new constitution for Iraq in the wake of his fall from power. Maaske also interviewed American and Iraqi soldiers alike, both fighting under a unified purpose.
In the film Weapons of Mass Destruction, Maaske and his five colleagues set out to assign faces to the numbers that he feels have become the empty statistics of status-quo casualties, wedged into the nightly news broadcast between the weather report and the trivia of the day.
The lack of physical evidence of atomic weapons of mass destruction, and the increasing duration of the war (it just passed the three year marker) has discouraged or frustrated many Americans, causing them to lose faith in the way President Bush is handling the situation, and making them question the U.S.' involvement in Iraq. In Weapons of Mass Destruction, Maaske is helping everyone remember just how bad things were for the struggling civilians of Iraq before the U.S. got involved, and reaffirming the fact that Saddam Hussein had to be taken out.
Maaske wasn't always in the documentary making business, before Weapons of Mass Destruction the Colorado native and central California resident was practicing as a successful real estate broker. After September 11 though, he became frustrated with the media, and their lack of coverage of Saddam Hussein's oppressive regime and the effect it was having on the people of the Middle East.
According to the film's website, "The picture of true evil was being hidden from the eyes of America. It was time for a truth-telling counter-offensive." Finally, he resolved to do it himself-to meet real people, get real names, and visit real villages; to discover for himself and finally reveal to others how serious the situation really was. His virtual inexperience in the arena of filmmaking did not stifle him as he charged into the project with an abundance of energy, and ended up finishing the piece in a matter of weeks. His pursuit to get the other side of the story-or rather the whole story, instead of the fragmented, biased sliver that he felt the media was presenting on primetime-led him and his crew everywhere from his own backyard in California, all the way to Iraq. Meetings with Iraqi families, and visits both to the graves of those who had been killed by Hussein and to the orphanages that have been filled by his surviving victims, all added up to create the majority of the substance of the movie. The group was able to conduct interviews with the prosecution team responsible for trying Hussein, and even those working on framing a new constitution for Iraq in the wake of his fall from power. Maaske also interviewed American and Iraqi soldiers alike, both fighting under a unified purpose.
In the film Weapons of Mass Destruction, Maaske and his five colleagues set out to assign faces to the numbers that he feels have become the empty statistics of status-quo casualties, wedged into the nightly news broadcast between the weather report and the trivia of the day.
The lack of physical evidence of atomic weapons of mass destruction, and the increasing duration of the war (it just passed the three year marker) has discouraged or frustrated many Americans, causing them to lose faith in the way President Bush is handling the situation, and making them question the U.S.' involvement in Iraq. In Weapons of Mass Destruction, Maaske is helping everyone remember just how bad things were for the struggling civilians of Iraq before the U.S. got involved, and reaffirming the fact that Saddam Hussein had to be taken out.