There are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know. Donald Rumsfeld proved a poor secretary of defense, but a provocative accidental poet. His gnomic dictums identify the volatile fuse of modern warfare: uncertainty. All military action cuts across the known and unknown. Commanding officers issue orders based on partial intelligence; subordinates obey those orders without need for explanation. These principles knit together absolute trust and total paranoia; they apply to all scales of military action, as much to a street maneuver as an entire nation's march towards war. The Soldier's Wife asks what happens when a breakdown occurs in that chain of command, when the mechanisms for trust have malfunctioned. On the level of the individual, when does uncertainty compromise control?
That strange device - with the straps, the pressure gauges, the computer keys - is a polygraph machine, a lie detector. Supposedly these inventions guarantee a measure of certainty, but inevitably results prove inconclusive. Likewise The Soldier's Wife defers establishing any definitive answers. If anything, it intimates the double-edged brutality of asking certain questions. Recently, US audiences have been exposed to a steady string of big-budget, high-profile films looking towards Iraq with anguish and outrage, as if the industry were trying to apologize for booing Michael Moore's protest at the 2003 Academy Awards. The Soldier's Wife refuses any such moralizing stance, soberly assessing how recent years' mayhem is distilled into the domestic. Sometime after her interrogation, a soldier's wife dashes out of a car and surveys her situation from the side of a road, along a divide that could run through anywhere in America, between any family.
- Colby Chamberlain
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