Paramount Home Media will be bringing the IFC Films
release of director Gavin Hood’s film adaptation of the Marcia and Thomas
Mitchell’s 2008 tell-all book, “The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun
and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq Invasion,” to the DVD marketplace on
Nov. 26 … the title was mercifully shortened for its theatrical run to Official
Secrets.
The film opened at Sundance in January of this year
and then proceeded to work the film festival circuit for next seven months as
something of an arthouse entry (with a number of wins along the way, including
the Provincetown International Film Festival and Traverse City Film Festival)
before being picked up by IFC Films for domestic theatrical distribution at the
end of August.
For the record, the ARR for the limited theatrical
run works out to 88 days and box office revenues currently stand at $1.9
million.
Keira Knightley plays the real-life Katherine Gun,
who is a British citizen born and raised in Taiwan, which meant that she could
speak fluent Mandarin. Why is that
important?
She returned to England, completed her education as
a linguist, but found little in the way of a rewarding career along those
lines. She ended up working as a
translator for GCHQ — which alphabet speak for “Government Communications
Headquarters” — a top-secret government operation tasked with monitoring
foreign-language transmissions for hints of terrorist operations and the like.
It’s now 2003 and the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s
1990 invasion of Kuwait, and his subsequent pounding and retreat, which has
left his Iraq as something of a rogue state in the eyes of the United
States. The drums are beating loud for
an invasion (WMD and all) and it is during this tension that a secret document
from an intelligence officer from the United States crosses her desk.
The gist of the document that Gun reads was asking
the Brits to help gather “blackmail” information on certain United Nations
members to secure their cooperation in a UN sanctioned invasion vote. She was shocked and went to the press with
the information. All true.
It gets better.
First there was a hunt to try and figure out who leaked the information
and Gun, fearing that her innocent co-workers would be swept up in such an
investigation, stepped forward.
She was arrested and charged with treason. Coming to her defense is Ben Emmerson
(played by Ralph Fiennes), a specialist in international law and human rights
(also a real-life character). Official
Secrets follows the year-long detention
and pressure that she was put under for violation of the UK's Official Secrets
Acts … which finally leads to Katharine Gun’s day in court and a twist ending
(which will not be revealed here).
Official Secrets
plays out like an Orwellian spy thriller, with the weight of an entire nation’s
government trying to crush one of their own for stepping out of line.
No comments:
Post a Comment