VENICE - The Iraq war has emerged as the big topic at this year's Venice film festival, with a film Saturday by a Canadian director showing the harrowing toll it is taking on returning US soldiers.
Coming just one day after "Redacted", Brian De Palma's dramatisation laying out the shocking facts of a rape and multiple murder in Iraq, Academy award-winning Paul Haggis unveiled "In the Valley of Elah", also inspired by true events, this time on US soil.
Like "Redacted", it explores the conditions, attitudes and stresses experienced by US soldiers in Iraq, and Haggis, like De Palma, said he felt the US public was being kept in the dark about the war.
"During Vietnam we had terrific journalists doing their job," Haggis told a news conference. "We were seeing it on television. Now we don't have it."
In his film, Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon play the parents of a soldier who goes missing shortly after returning from Iraq.
The father's search for their son, aided by a feisty police detective played by Charlize Theron, turns into a murder mystery that slowly uncovers hard truths about the Iraq war and its traumatising effects on US soldiers.
In discovering the brutality of which his son was capable, Jones' character, a former military MP, has to upturn long-held beliefs.
Haggis -- whose movie "Crash" won the best picture Oscar last year -- said he wanted the film to be "political but not partisan," noting that he wrote it "through the eyes of a very proud American who believes he knows -- who knows right from wrong."
The film shows "the truth of what's happening," he said. "We had better open our eyes to these concerns."
Saturday's lineup also included British director Ken Loach's "It's a Free World", about a young woman, Angie, who gets sacked from an employment agency and decides to set up one of her own along with her flatmate Rosie.
Set in a down-and-out section of London plagued by gangs and full of job-hungry migrants, the film paints a dual portrait of determination and desperation.
Angie starts out making a better life for herself with apparent empathy for the workers, but greed catches up with her.
"You get wrapped up in it, you get greedier and greedier," said Kierston Wareing of her character.
"We try to tell stories that are both personal and psychological, that present to us the kind of society that we're creating," Loach said. "The way Angie and Rosie behave is the way society wants them to ... to screw their neighbour."
He said the exploitation of poor immigrants is not a mere "force of nature" resulting from globalisation. "It's important that we don't let them get away with this, that some people have to be exploited and others get extremely rich."
Expected to grace the red carpet Saturday evening were Hollywood's glamour couple, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
Pitt's "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" is on the menu for Sunday.
Woody Allen was also expected ahead of the Sunday screening of his "Cassandra's Dream."
Meanwhile Saturday, US filmmaker Spike Lee was on hand for the announcement of an online film festival to be hosted by Babelgum, a free-to-view Internet television network.
"When I was starting out there was no Internet. I was in the prehistoric age," Lee, who will be the festival's honorary judge, told a news conference. "Now, if you have a film and you're talented, if someone hasn't seen it, it's your fault."
Open to films screened at international film festivals between January 2007 and next February, the festival begins February 15, when the public will be able to rate the films online in six categories including short film, documentary, animation, social/environment and advertising.
A sixth category, the "Looking for Genius Award," is for "new or emerging talent who display clear and outstanding achievement."
Nine jurors will judge the leading 10 in each category, while Lee will review their top three picks in each. Winners will pocket 20,000 euros (27,000 dollars).

09/01/2007 17:47 GMT