- From John Priddy

I wish you could have seen “Winning the Peace” on the big screen as I did in 2005 at the Directors’ Guild of Hollywood. That year, Eli Akira Kaufmann’s masterful 18-minute film won the Angelus Student Film Festival Fujifilm Audience Impact Award. Kaufmann joined us for Windrider Forums during Sundance and in Colorado Springs in 2005, where both he and his film were a huge hit.

This incredibly talented filmmaker grew up in Marin County, Calif., in a family that could easily be straight out of central casting. “We’re pretty nonmilitary, peace-loving tree huggers,” Kaufmann says. But when the UCLA grad student started work on a short film set amid the fighting in Iraq, he was determined not to produce an anti-war polemic.

“Winning the Peace” is the remarkably even-handed result of those aims. The film tells the story of Sgt. Charlie Latif, an Iraqi American Marine whose desire to do the right thing collides tragically with the bloody realities of war. According to Kaufmann, “The film doesn’t tell you what to think, and that was the whole idea.”

Latif is played by Australian Don Hany, an award-winning actor born to an Iraqi violinist-turned-restaurateur father, and a Hungarian doctor of economics. Ever the leading man, Hany’s performance and rugged good looks bring an air of reality and presence to the screen.

——————————— 
Please Note: This film has profanity (in context, during combat scenes) and may not be suitable for children under 15. Windrider rating is M for mature audiences.

—————————– 
When I recently watched this amazing film again, it elicited an entirely different response from my 2005 experience. If  “Little Red Plane” stirred me to think further about fathers and fatherlessness (see my Feb. 17 blog), “Winning the Peace” led me to ponder what duty, service and fatherhood can — and should — look like. 

Latif’s character serves as a role model for fathers, and while that may not have been Kaufmann’s intent, godly guidelines are clearly embodied in the film’s hero. Here is a man called to do his duty, to serve his country and to “do the right thing.” The film doesn’t sugar-coat the complexity and challenges involved; it simply makes the observation that, a sense of duty should be intrinsic to the nature of fatherhood.

The film also shows us the main character’s call to service. In this case, a bright orange soccer ball and a few Iraqi children demonstrate that even the simplest acts reflect a father’s heart.

Finally, we see Latif’s personal struggle to be a father to his own son, a world away. Their deep personal connection, coupled with the incredible chasm of the distance separating them, provides an interesting backdrop for exploring the topics of duty, service, calling and fatherhood. Latif’s paternal instincts are reflected in his phone calls to his son back home — each with its instruction to “make sure you hug your mother for me”; and its encouragement: “Good luck in the big game.” We also observe moments of silence — “when words are just not enough.”

The question remains; what do duty and service have to do with fatherhood?