Elliot Ruiz is movie-star handsome and delivers a memorable performance in "The Battle for Haditha," one of a crop of war-themed films premiering this year at the Toronto International Film Festival.
So where did the docudrama's director, Britain's Nick Broomfield, find the 23-year-old Philadelphia native who's already caught the attention of Will Smith's production company? In the U.S. Marine Corps.
All the marines in "The Battle for Haditha," in fact, are played by real-life military men, including Canadian Eric Mehalacopoulos, who joined the marines when he was 18 after moving to the United States. Both Ruiz and the Montreal-born Mehalacopoulos have had tours of duty in Iraq.
That actual marines would be interested in acting in a film that had the potential to portray them as a band of psychopathic killers speaks volumes about the political climate four years into a prolonged and bloody conflict that's killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and almost 4,000 American troops.
"I didn't want the film to make the marines look bad," the 26-year-old Mehalacopoulos says over coffee at a downtown hotel. "But I do think the war's wrong. I'm not going to lie. I don't think it's right. There's a lot of people dying."
War-themed movies are plentiful at this year's festival, including Brian DePalma's scathing "Redacted," talk-show host Phil Donahue's directorial debut "Body of War," and Paul Haggis's "In the Valley of Elah."
But with the exception of DePalma's film, which explores the rape of a young Iraqi girl by a group of monstrous marines, there are precious few flinty-eyed villains to be found in battle fatigues patrolling the dusty, deadly villages of Iraq.
The true ogres, most of the filmmakers suggest, are the ones in Washington who sent the troops into Iraq and are calling the shots.
Even in the Reese Witherspoon-Jake Gyllenhaal movie "Rendition," a film not about the Iraq war but the assault on civil liberties in the aftermath of 9-11, it's Meryl Streep's CIA director who seems even more of a sociopath than the men she hopes are torturing the truth out of terror suspects in Egypt.
While some of the marines in "In the Valley of Elah" are most certainly psychopathic, Haggis makes it clear that it was their time in Iraq that has caused their transformations from dutiful sons to short-fused killers.
And "Body of War" is a sympathetic look at 25-year-old Tomas Young, paralyzed from a bullet to his spine after serving in Iraq for less than a week. He signed up after 9-11 thinking he was going to Afghanistan, but ended up in Iraq instead.
Broomfield's film masterfully manages not only to show the war from the Iraqi perspective, but to humanize the marines, even as they execute 24 innocent and unarmed Iraqi men, women and children in retaliation for a roadside bomb that killed one of the U.S. men.
The film doesn't truly vilify anyone, not the men who plant the bomb nor the jittery soldiers who commit a terrible crime in a moment of madness - but who were, in fact, following standard marines procedure to take out everyone in a house if it's believed to be "hostile."
"They're little kids, these guys who join," Broomfield says. "I hate the way they join the army and they turn into killing machines, but you can't blame the marines. If you teach a dog to be an attack dog, which is what they are, don't be surprised when they attack."
Broomfield is blunt: he hopes his movie and others like it will persuade the U.S. government to pull their troops out of Iraq.
"What I like about all these movies is they are all agents of social change," says Broomfield, the cutting-edge documentarian behind 1998's "Kurt and Courtney."
"It's the runup to the American election so it's an important time to influence the American public now in a way that goes beyond the television news. You can hear on TV that 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians were killed, but you don't get the human story, you don't get to know who these people were and what they were doing at the time. And what cinema can do is to humanize these stories and make them very real to us so we can make more informed decisions about a withdrawal from Iraq."
From the perspective of marines Mehalacopoulos and Ruiz, Broomfield nailed it - both the state of relentless anxiety they lived with every day in Iraq and the true face of Arab culture, much of it focused on children and family.
"It's real, all of that stuff in the movie - it's from us and from what we went through and what we saw," Mehalacopoulos says.
Ruiz adds: "Nick got the real thing. He didn't take sides. You even see the terrorist who planted the bomb and then feels bad about it later. Everybody is a human being in the movie."
