TEHRAN – The Iranian Artists Forum (IAF) is showing selected anti-war films in a program titled “The American Lie”.

In the program, taking place this week at the IAF Cinematheque, five films with anti-war themes and critical perspectives on American society have been selected for screening, Mehr reported.

So far, three films have been shown, including “American Sniper” (2014), directed by Clint Eastwood, “Quo Vadis, Aida?” (2020), by Jasmila Žbanić, and “Civil War” (2024), by Alex Garland.

On Thursday, the IAF will screen “The Report,” written and directed by Scott Z. Burns. It is a 2019 American historical political drama that stars Adam Driver, Annette Bening, Jon Hamm, Ted Levine, Michael C. Hall, Tim Blake Nelson, Corey Stoll, and Maura Tierney.

It depicts the efforts of staffer Daniel Jones as he led the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency's use of torture following the September 11 attacks, covering more than a decade's worth of real-life political intrigue related to the contents, creation, and release of the 6,700-pages of the US Senate report on CIA torture.

The film is Burns’s feature directing debut, a docudrama about US Senate researcher Daniel J Jones and his decade-long battle to publish the gigantic report he’d written on the CIA’s post-9/11 use of “extreme interrogation techniques” (such as waterboarding), a report impeded at every step by the agency and the White House itself.

The film does a good job at showing how the right succeeded in framing the debate in terms of wussy-liberals-are-squeamish-but-torture-gets-answers. The point of Jones’s report is that torture did not get answers. This is not a Watergate-type tale of journalist-heroism; the person risking jail and meeting shadowy informants in underground carparks is Jones himself, played by Adam Driver with a cool, calm deliberation.

On Friday, “Official Secrets,” directed by Gavin Hood, will be shown at the IAF Cinematheque. It is a 2019 British drama, based on the case of whistleblower Katharine Gun, who exposed an illegal spying operation by American and British intelligence services to gauge the sentiment of and potentially blackmail United Nations diplomats tasked to vote on a resolution regarding the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Katharine Gun was a translator working for the British security services at the GCHQ surveillance unit in Cheltenham. In 2003, she was astonished to receive an email making it plain she was expected to find out incriminating personal details in the lives of UN representatives from small countries so that they could be blackmailed into voting for the war in Iraq. Gun printed out the email and passed it to an anti-war friend, and it eventually formed the basis of a sensational front-page scoop in the Observer.

Although it did not stop the war, as Gun dreamed of doing, it played an important part in turning the press and public opinion. Gun herself was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act.

Keira Knightley stars as Gun, alongside Matt Smith, Matthew Goode, Adam Bakri, Indira Varma, and Ralph Fiennes.

The movie screenings will begin at 6 p.m. at the Nasseri Hall of the IAF, located at the Artists Park, North Mousavi Street, Taleqani Street.

SS/SAB