Restrepo

Winner – Documentary Grand Jury Prize – 2010 Sundance Film Festival

RESTREPO is the electrifying documentary by award-winning journalists Tim Hetherington (“Long Story Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold”) and Sebastian Junger (“The Perfect Storm,” the upcoming “War”). Chronicling the deployment of a platoon of American soldiers at one of the most dangerous outposts in Afghanistan, RESTREPO captures the day-to-day reality of modern warfare as never seen before. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

\From June 2007 to July 2008, Hetherington and Junger embedded with the soldiers of Second Platoon, Battle Company in the remote Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan, as they fought to build and maintain a remote 15-man outpost named “Restrepo” after a platoon medic who was killed in action. The filmmakers avoid all outside commentary and political context in order to present us war as it is actually lived by soldiers, through their own eyes and in their own words—the backbreaking labor, the deadly firefights, the boredom, the camaraderie. Presented as a 90-minute deployment, RESTREPO is documentary filmmaking at its most bracingly visceral.

Sebastian Junger has been reporting from Afghanistan since 1996. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and the bestselling author of the “The Perfect Storm” and “A Death in Belmont.” His latest book, “War,” will be published by Twelve in May 2010 (www.twelvebooks.com). Photojournalist Tim Hetherington has reported on conflict for over ten years. He was awarded the 2008 World Press Photo prize for his work in Afghanistan and is a contributing photographer to Vanity Fair.

“Astonishing… You’ve never seen fighting like this. Ever.” – Anne Thompson, indieWIRE

“Pretty much the most eye-opening way you could spend 90 minutes watching images on a screen. Hundreds of TV programs and features have been made on the subject, but none so vividly give the sense of what it’s like to live, and die, as a contemporary U.S. soldier… Coming after The Hurt Locker...This movie gives you the same edge-of-your-seat sense of suspense and awe.” – Steve Zeitchik, The Los Angeles Times

“I’ve never seen combat footage like Junger and Hetherington get in RESTREPO; it’s raw, relentless, and made all the more unsettling by the fact that the soldiers can’t see who’s shooting at them... an unsentimental but admiring look at a soldier’s life, shot in one of the deadliest theaters of combat that’s ever existed.” – Noel Murray, The Onion

“An extraordinary, shattering depiction of war.” (New York Magazine)

“There is no other film like this one, a riveting, you-are-there, deployment to a godforsaken place where United States troops are pinned down by enemy fire almost every day.” (Andrew O’Hehir, Salon)