“It’s truly a dream come true,” Reed Van Dyke said. His feature directorial debut “Tsugunai” will be released at Directors Fortnight. “If I ever had a dream in the film industry, it was to screen a film at Cannes. I have a long-standing relationship with this section of the Cannes Film Festival. There are a lot of Fortnite films that have meant a lot to me as I’ve come of age as a filmmaker, and they’ve taught me a lot about the craft of film.”
CAA Media Finance and Goodfellas are handling sales for the film, which stars Boyd Holbrook, Hiam Abbas and Kenneth Branagh.
Van Dyke’s resume is packed with award-winning short films, including the Oscar-nominated “DeKalb Elementary.” But for his first feature, he drew inspiration from veteran reporter Dexter Filkins’ articles about tragic events in the Iraq War, as well as a handful of documentaries, including one of his favorite foreign films, Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012’s The Act of Killing.
“Tsuguunai” begins with a tense setting in Baghdad, where an Iraqi family led by matriarch Mariam (Abbas) completes mundane tasks as a bomb attack looms. But when they decide to evacuate, they find themselves in the middle of an urban battle between U.S. Marines and what the soldiers consider to be rebels. What happens next will be horrifying for Mariam’s family and heartbreaking for everyone involved. Reporter Michael Reed (Branagh) interviews Lou (Holbrook), a Marine involved in the incident, but is turned away by the police. The film then moves several years later, showing how the gunfight affected the lives of those involved: Mariam and her family, Lou and Michael.
But as the title suggests, Lou is seeking, perhaps not forgiveness, but a human connection with Mariam and her family, who have moved to California and know they will be okay. Mariam tells Lou, almost mechanically, that she forgives him for his role in the incident, but she also finds a human connection with him. Empathy and humanity are key.
“One of the things that really intrigued me was the shared perspective on the incident, and then the aftermath becomes a topic of conversation,” he says.
Van Dyke says it wasn’t easy to get into the story right away, but they decided to structure the film in four acts, from the perspectives of Mariam, Lou, and Michael. This gives Van Dyke the freedom to explore key character-building scenes, recognizing that the audience is smart enough not to take his explanations at face value.
“The last act is effectively the Mariam section of the film,” he says. “This story is told from her perspective. What was exciting for me about telling this story was really presenting multiple perspectives of this event and really leaning into and understanding the Iraqi side of this experience myself as a writer and director.”
This is my first full-length work, and it is a work that depicts a complex swirl of human emotions. “Ultimately, you end up making a movie trying to understand why you need to make a movie,” Van Dyke says, adding that he was interested in “depicting the civilian side of the experience, which would probably be underground in this Western about war. And seeing someone grapple with not just a physical wound, but a psychological wound. What happens to the human psyche when you kill someone in the kind of foggy heat of a moment of war?”
The cast certainly delivers. While Holbrook gives a sensitive and powerful performance, casting Abbas was “a no-brainer,” Van Dyke says. “She’s the Meryl Streep of the Middle East.” Branagh has adopted an American accent, but revealed he was on set as an actor. “But there was a time when we were trying to figure out who to shoot first and he whispered something to me and I was like, we’re going to have a long dinner after this and I’m going to ask all the questions that I haven’t been able to ask for the last three months.”
