‘Atonement’, directed by American filmmaker Reed Van Dyk, reaches cinemas for a limited release beginning on 2 October, revisiting a true story that took place in Baghdad in 2003, when US soldiers killed three members of an Iraqi family. Nearly a decade later, one of the soldiers involved in the shooting sought to meet the survivors and confront what had happened. The meeting ended with the family deciding to forgive him.
The film is Van Dyk’s first feature and stars Boyd Holbrook, Hiam Abbass and Kenneth Branagh. It premiered in North America at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, with its cinema release expanding from 9 October, a week after the limited release began.
‘Atonement’ is based on Dexter Filkins’ investigation
The film is based on an article published by journalist Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker in 2012. It examines one of the incidents of the Iraq War, which American cinema has often portrayed from the perspective of US soldiers.
Van Dyk instead chose to place the Iraqi family at the centre of the narrative and follow the shooting’s impact on its members, alongside its effect on the life of the soldier who returned to the United States. The original incident took place in April 2003, when three generations of an Iraqi Christian family of Armenian origin were travelling by car back home in Baghdad.
At the time, US forces were engaged in clashes with Iraqi forces in the city. The family’s cars passed through the fighting before US Marines opened fire, killing three members of the family.
The deaths of three family members haunt the survivors and the soldier
The incident remained part of the survivors’ lives and continued to haunt one of the Marines involved in the shooting, Lou Lobello. After returning from Iraq, Lobello suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and was unable to escape the memory of the civilians killed that day. Years later, he turned to journalist Dexter Filkins for help reaching the family and arranging a meeting.
The family agreed to the meeting request. Nearly ten years after the shooting, Lobello sat in the living room of the family home in Glendale, California, facing two women who had survived the attack. The encounter, after years of loss and painful memories, ended with the family deciding to forgive the former soldier.
The film’s characters have different names from the real protagonists
‘Atonement’ retains the main outlines of the real story but changes the characters’ names for the screen. Boyd Holbrook plays Lou D’Alessandro, inspired by Lobello’s experience, while Palestinian actor Hiam Abbass plays Miriam, the head of a family who lost her husband and two sons in the shooting.
Kenneth Branagh plays journalist Michael Reed, a character inspired by Dexter Filkins, who covered the confrontation during the war and later became a link between the former soldier and the family. Through this character, the journalist moves from being a witness recording events to becoming someone who helps bring together two people each carrying a different mark of the same incident.
The film follows three parallel dramatic threads: the Iraqi family caught in the shooting and losing three of its members; the soldier who took part in the shooting and returned home burdened by memories of the incident; and the journalist who witnessed the war before becoming, years later, an intermediary between the two sides. The threads converge in the encounter that forms the film’s climax.
Van Dyk does not present the incident as a mystery centred on determining who was responsible for the shooting. Instead, he begins with its consequences and follows the survivors and the soldier after they leave Iraq. This structure gradually leads viewers towards the later meeting, while keeping the family’s loss at the heart of the story rather than reducing it to a backdrop for the American soldier’s journey.
Van Dyk places the Iraqi family at the centre of the narrative
Van Dyk said one of his main reasons for making the film was to reconsider the place of Iraqi characters in works about the Iraq War. He said Iraqis usually appear in these films ‘through the sights of snipers or in the background’, whereas he wanted to reverse the perspective and place people affected by the incident and by the war more broadly at the centre of the story.
The film begins with the Iraqi family, showing its members living amid the conditions of war before the shooting, then moving to the incident’s impact on their lives. In a parallel storyline, it follows the American soldier after his return home, without allowing the move into the post-war years to erase the family or turn it into a secondary detail in his experience.
This approach differs from that of several American films about the Iraq War, which made the experience of the soldier returning to the United States the centre of the story, while Iraqi characters appeared as part of the setting in which he carried out his military experience. Van Dyk, by contrast, seeks to show the incident from the perspective of those who were in front of the gun, not solely from the position of the person holding it.
The character of Lou D’Alessandro, played by Holbrook, reflects aspects of Lobello’s experience after returning from Iraq. The former soldier leaves the battlefield but cannot move beyond what happened there, remaining preoccupied with the memory of the civilians who were killed. As his inner conflict continues, he begins searching for the people who were on the other side of the shooting, eventually asking the journalist who witnessed the incident for help.
Holbrook described the bullet in the film as moving in two directions, indicating that the film follows its impact on both the victim and the soldier who fired it. He said his character struggles with that impact throughout the film, while stressing that the two losses are not identical: the family lost three members, whereas the soldier returned carrying responsibility for and memories of the incident.
Hiam Abbass plays Miriam, whose husband and two sons were killed before she found herself, years later, facing one of the soldiers involved in the shooting. Abbass said she drew on her experience as a mother and as a Palestinian woman raised in an environment familiar with war while developing the character. What struck her most was the real woman’s capacity for forgiveness on which the character is based.
Abbass stressed that this woman’s ability to forgive does not mean that everyone who has experienced something similar can take the same position. She questioned the large number of war victims who cannot move beyond what they suffered in the same way, presenting the decision to forgive as a specific individual experience rather than a generally expected response from survivors.
The film treats forgiveness as a choice belonging to the family, not an inevitable result of the soldier’s arrival and request to meet, nor a solution that can be applied to war victims generally. The soldier arrives wanting a confrontation, but the family members who endured the loss retain the right first to decide whether to receive him, and then to determine their position towards him years after the incident.
Through the character of Michael Reed, the film gives the journalist a role that goes beyond that of a reporter who documents events and leaves. The information and contacts he gained while covering the war return to him when the former soldier asks for help finding the family, making him part of the developments in a story he had initially witnessed.
Van Dyk turned Filkins’ 2012 article into his first feature film, changing the characters’ names and building the plot around the shooting and its lasting consequences.
The director previously worked in short films and drew attention with ‘DeKalb Elementary’, which received Oscar nominations, before moving into feature filmmaking with ‘Atonement’.
