The Kill Team is a film that sticks with you. I saw it at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival, where it picked up the Grand Jury Prize for documentary. That was over a year ago, but some of its images remain vivid and urgent in my mind. Perhaps that’s because the film itself is urgent, a journalistic expose of war crimes committed by some American soldiers in Afghanistan. At the center is Specialist Adam Winfield, a member of the unit in question who tried to alert the military and ended up instead charged with first degree murder himself. It’s a brutal narrative but an essential one, cracking open our often simplistic ideas about war.
Filmmaker Dan Krauss has made a film as bold as its subject matter, hiding nothing from the audience. This stark commitment to bravery as both a journalistic stance and an aesthetic choice is highlighted by the poster. Nonfics is happy to premiere this one-sheet, courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories, which releases the film on July 25th. It features the image of Winfield with his lips blocked by an American flag, washed in white, a blunt evocation of the imposed silence around issues of military misconduct. The single blurb is taken from my Film School Rejects review, which you can read here.
Visit the film’s website to learn more.
