A fictional story inspired by true events, Brian De Palma’s Redacted considers the way information is packaged, distributed and received in an era with infinite channels of communication. At the Venice Film Festival held earlier this month, De Palma received the Best Director award for this project.

Through a variety of created source material—video diaries, produced documentary, surveillance footage, online testimonials, news pieces—the film comments on the disconnect between the surface of an image and the reality of ideas and the truth.

Shot on location in Jordan in English, French and Arabic, Redacted focuses on a small group of American soldiers stationed at a checkpoint in Iraq during a single inciting incident. The film alternates points of view, balancing the experiences of soldiers under duress and members of the media with those of the local Iraqi people, illuminating how each has been affected by the current conflict and their encounters with each other.

“I told this story years ago in my film Casualties of War,” De Palma explains, recalling his 1989 film set against the Vietnam War, “but the lessons from the Vietnam War have gone unheeded. But how to tell the story today? And how did it all begin?”

De Palma recalls, “Last year at the Toronto Film Festival I was approached by a representative of HDNet Films who asked if I would be interested in making a film using high-definition video. I said I would if I could find a subject matter that would be best explored in the medium.

“Then I read about an incident in the Iraq War,” the director continues. “In researching the event, I read soldiers’ blogs and books, watched soldiers’ homemade war videos, surfed their Web sites and their YouTube postings. It was all there, and all in video.”

“To redact is to edit or prepare for publishing,” De Palma continues. “Frequently, a redacted document or image has simply had personal information deleted or blacked out; as a consequence, ‘redacted’ is often used to describe documents or images from which sensitive information has been expunged. The true story of our Iraq War has been redacted from the mainstream corporate media. If we are going to cause such disorder, then we must face the horrendous images that are the consequences of these actions. Once we saw them in Vietnam, our citizens protested and brought that misguided conflict to an end. Let’s hope the images from this film have the same effect.”