The notion of art as an imitation of life is certainly bolstered by the
wave of documentaries and politically-infused dramas and even action
flicks making their way to theaters this year. Many are the product of
an anxious world climate in general and a four-years-and-counting war
and foreign occupation with no end in sight in particular. The latest
of these films is director Gavin Hood’s Rendition. Cross-cutting between continents, the movie tells the story of Isabella El-Ibrahimi (Reese Witherspoon),
the American wife of an Egyptian-born, domestically educated chemical
engineer named Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally) who disappears on a
flight from South Africa to Washington D.C.. Plying an ex-boyfriend (Peter Sarsgaard),
now the senior staffer of a senator, for help, Isabella desperately
tries to track her husband down, while a young CIA analyst (Jake Gyllenhaal) at a secret detention facility outside the United States is forced to
question his assignment as he becomes party to some unorthodox
interrogation techniques. The South African-born Hood came to acclaim
with the Oscar-winning Tsotsi,
about a week in the life of a young thug who eventually tries to set
right his errant ways. While the filmmaker admits to having a
longstanding interest in matters political, he says he didn’t have a
strong knowledge about the particular interstices of U.S. detention and
intelligence-gathering prior to tackling this project.

“The script came across my desk and I started reading,” Hood recalls during a recent interview. “I read Rendition
on the cover and it could have been Beethoven’s Ninth. I dunno, maybe
it’s a rendition of a song? But I started reading and I just found
that I was captivated,” he continues. “I kept turning the pages. I
wanted to know what happened next and I thought that [screenwriter
Kelley Sane] had drawn some incredible, and incredibly diverse,
characters that were all emotionally rooted and real.” With this
initial fascination came a lot of questions. But for Hood, who grew up
in a country without a constitution and where, in the 1980s, people
were detained without trial, it was almost as if he was dealing with
the makings of a South African political thriller. “When I was a young
law student, we looked at the American Constitution as a document that
we felt our country desperately needed,” Hood explains. “And to see
chipped away that great document — and the principles of the Geneva
Convention, which America was largely behind writing after the horrors
of the Second World War — was quite a shock.”

“Now that I have American kids, albeit very recently, I feel even more
strongly about the subject matter,” he adds. “I believe in the
founding principals of this nation and I felt that this film would
perhaps contribute to a discussion that I feel is important. Principals
should not be abandoned without serious discussion, and patriotic
Americans should stand up for what America stands for.” For the full feature piece, from FilmStew, click here.