Rev. Danny Fisher

I’m a little late reporting on this, but I didn’t find out until just a moment ago: Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris’ upcoming film Standard Operating Procedure, which investigates the acts of torture committed by U.S. military personnel at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival a couple of weeks ago. It was the first documentary ever shown in competition at the festival, and it received the jury’s grand prize.

If you don’t know who Morris is by name, this will need to be rectified. I’m with Roger Ebert, who says:

After twenty years of reviewing films, I haven’t found another filmmaker who intrigues me more…Errol Morris is like a magician, and as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini.

Morris has made no less than three of the greatest films I have ever seen in my life: 1980′s Gates of Heaven (a must-see for chaplains), 1988′s The Thin Blue Line (which helped to free a wrongly convicted man from prison), and 2003′s The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

For Standard Operating Procedure, Morris conducted over 200 hours of interviews with those most closely involved in what occurred at Abu Ghraib. At the 2007 New Yorker Film Festival, he presented these deleted scenes (which can also be seen below). They are excerpts from his interviews with Col. Janis Karpinski, the former commanding general of the prison. After watching them, all I can say is that if this is what ended up on the cutting room floor, then what remains in the film must be absolutely incredible. I think we’re in for an incendiary and important work.

Standard Operating Procedure opens in limited release on April 25th. Find out more at http://www.errolmorris.com.