Kevin Basl: Many Vietnam War veterans have been mentors to us post-9/11 veterans, especially in anti-war activist circles and artist communities, precisely what’s represented in This Is Not a War Story. This is one of those lazy story telling games where there isn't a game attached. O'Brien says that you can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it. The aptly titled “This is Not a War Story” takes place far from distant battlefields. With Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese's third feature-length project, “This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection,” a hugely talented product of the Southern Africa kingdom of Lesotho makes his mark. Talia Lugacy’s bold film, This is Not a War Story, points a middle finger at what a character in the film calls, “that ‘good war’ bullshit”. Directed by Talia Lugacy. “Look, this is not a war story. An undeclared war between India and Pakistan is being waged in the upper reaches of the Kargil-Dras sector of Jammu and Kashmir. THIS IS NOT A WAR STORY tracks a ragtag group of combat veterans in New York whose anti-war art, poetry and papermaking keep them together, despite the spectre of their friend’s suicide and the ever-crystalizing fact that healing from war is sometimes an impossible mission. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor … This is "This is Not a War Story Prescreening Announcements" by CINEJOY on CREATICS on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them. This is a war story." This is an excuse to tell stories. In this sense, O'Brien's analysis of Sanders's story recalls the title of the chapter, "How to Tell a True War Story." You can't tease it out. Talia Lugacy’s “This is not a War Story” opens with a suicide.A young recently returned from combat war veteran hustles through various subway trains. Hemingway was 18 years old when he volunteered to be an ambulance driver for WWI. So much fun and imagination.” It’s great that a film like Stripes exists to add some laughter about an institution both hoisted and demonized throughout history. In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. “A true war story is never moral. I’ve learned a lot from Jan and Walt [Nygard], the Vietnam veterans in the workshop in the film. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. You tell a true war story by making the stomach believe. According to the author, a true war story is not about war, but about war’s related experiences. It suggests a second meaning to be applied to the readers and hearers of stories: that readers and hearers can "tell," or discern, stories that hold a truth, regardless of whether the events of the story actually occurred, based on certain criteria. This is no David-versus-Goliath battle which Pakistan would have the world believe is being fought by a 600-strong militant force holding out against the might of the world's fourth-largest army. With Danny Ramirez, Frances Fisher, Sam Adegoke, Brian Delate. At its best, This Is Not a War Story is a quietly-enthralling character study in pain that dives into the heart of the unspeakable and comes out the other side. 1. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. It is most definitely a war story, even if all of its stories of war take place off screen and in the past through occasional remanences. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. I really do not like this sort of game. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh." It's about the emotions and effects that the war has on the soldier. Sun Tzu in The Art of War wrote: "Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt." (See the handout with all the rules); he means that they may take place during the war but the main point is never about war; it may always be true in the sense that that may not have been what happened but that is how the narrator might have felt That is largely due to the work Lugacy is doing on both sides of the lens. War stories are fictional truth. ... For these reasons, this is not a Holocaust story." O'Brien doesn't exactly say that war stories are not moral--he says that you can tell a true war story because it does not teach a lesson, or have a point. Emotional and domestic labor have never been part of the grand story men have told themselves about the destiny of the species—not even when they imagine its grave. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.” ― Dwight D. 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