The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends
**/****
directed by Patricia Foulkrod
by Alex Jackson Too often I feel that critics and audiences place documentaries at the kid's table, refusing to critique them on the same level they do fiction films. Narration from the director, sit-down interviews with the subjects–in terms of filmmaking, we let documentaries get away with a lot of really primitive shit we probably wouldn't otherwise. Patricia Foulkrod's The Ground Truth is a pretty good rant, but not much of a movie; Foulkrod made it because she had a burning desire to say something, not because she had a burning desire to make a film. There's no excitement or joy in the aesthetics, it's all dreadfully utilitarian–just enough to illustrate her thesis without unduly affecting the audience. In part because there's no narrative, The Ground Truth doesn't have any dramatic high points, either: for the entire duration, it rumbles on the same low growl. Still, the film gets you good and angry, and because it's in that emotionally and cinematically vacant tradition of documentary-making called "objectivity," you know that you're getting angry off the ideas in it. The film is about how post-traumatic stress disorder is undiagnosed and untreated among veterans of the second Gulf War and how the media's whitewashing of the war's civilian casualties only exasperates the situation. If we were to truly "support the troops," we would have to acknowledge the damage they have caused the Iraqi people as well as the toll this has taken on their minds, hearts, and souls, to say nothing of their support for the actual war. To suppress the evil (necessary or otherwise) of the second Gulf War is an act of wilful naivety and a deflation of our troops' sacrifice. It's pitiful that a film like The Ground Truth had to be made, but it did.
