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A film by Vivian Wong. On March 23rd, 2003, the 507th Maintenance Compan...
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A film by Vivian Wong. On March 23rd, 2003, the 507th Maintenance Company was ambushed near the town of Nasiriyah, Iraq. Eleven soldiers were killed and five were captured by Iraqi soldiers as prisoners. Among the POWs was a 19-year-old blonde hair blue eyed female soldier named Jessica Lynch from Palestine, West Virginia. Jessica�s rescue story quickly took center stage and her ordeal was used by the government to deflect negative attention away from the Iraq war. The Jessica Lynch incident ultimately extended beyond her persona to engage the nation in discussions of gender, race, war, and patriotism. Sources ranging from her personal biography, internet images, and news articles were used to generate a fictional Jessica Lynch who engages in a philosophical meditation on war. Notes and images collected by Jessica becomes the basis of this self-reflexive video diary where she confronts her past and discusses her personal friendship with best friend Lori Piestewa. "Dear Lori" combines both original and found footage to explore personal and collective memory, the media, women in war, and the notion of nationhood.
Cast
Kay Copeland, Jessica Lynch
Filmmaker Bio
Vivian Wong is a 22 year old artist who graudated from Cooper Union in New York City, with concentrations in video/animation, photography, and drawing. I am fascinated by the seduction of violence, and investigating acts of violence specifically in the context of war. Soldiers are trained to fantasize about aggression and brutality. I am not invested in the John Wayne myth of courage and heroism shown during combat situations; instead I am compulsively pulled into those moments of self-discovery that occur amidst the horrors of war. For me, the uniform is the site of transformation; it somehow contains shamanistic powers of protection in combat. It allows an individual to redefine him or herself in relation to a collective, literally and figuratively offering the body to a national identity. Initially, the possibility of anonymity, escape, and self-discovery attracted me to the military. But notions of control, victimization, violence, pain, etc. inevitably crept into my investigation.
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