When Brian De Palma made Casualties of War, based on an incident in which a group of American soldiers raped a young girl in Viet Nam, it was 15 years after that war had ended. His new film Redacted is based on a similar incident in Iraq—the rape and murder by American soldiers of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl. That horrendous crime (the girl’s family was also murdered) took place in March 2006, less than a year and a half prior to the film’s premiere.

The point isn’t that De Palma is repeating himself, but that the country is: For as much as supporters of our involvement in Iraq decry comparisons to Viet Nam, it is in essential ways Viet Nam all over again. Of course, the government learned its lessons about keeping a lid on distressing information after losing the support of the media in the 1960s. So it falls to a filmmaker who wants to engage the truth to be equally sophisticated in telling a story that viewers think they already know.

Redacted announces its intentions with its title. A term you probably never heard prior to 2002, it simply means to edit or revise something in preparation for publication. In the military version of newspeak, of course, it means censorship. Working in high-definition video on a small budget, De Palma’s goal (aside from reminding us that war is hell) is to make viewers suspicious of the evidence of our eyes. Shaping this entirely fictional (albeit reality-based) film as pieces from a soldier’s war diary, a French news documentary, propaganda footage, YouTube rants and other “found” sources, he wants us to question the validity of what we are looking at—or, more precisely, what we are being shown.

Debuting on home video this week, Redacted only played theaters in a handful of cities last fall, though it stirred up more than its share of controversy. The reliably incendiary Bill O’Reilly, who saw only a few clips of the film, ranted that it was anti-American propaganda, and said of De Palma “Charles Manson is an American, too, but does he represent this country in any way? Of course not. And I believe even the odious Manson would not make a movie like Redacted.”

I had a chance to speak to De Palma at a press breakfast during Redacted’s North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival last September. He told me that while Viet Nam became known as the war that was brought into America’s living rooms, that is not true of the Iraq conflict.

“Quite the contrary: We have not seen the images,” he says. “The only way you can really see the images of what these soldiers are facing [in Iraq] is on the Internet. Now what percentage is that of the major media? I don’t think [the government worries] about it because it’s like a sliver. You’ve gotta be pro-active—you have to go after the material. It’s there, even beheadings, they’re there. But I don’t think most people do that. They sit and watch what’s on their television set. And they’re not going to see any of this stuff. It’s like reading foreign newspapers if you think the ones you’re reading at home aren’t really reflecting what’s going on.”

Trolling the Internet was how the veteran director devised Redacted. De Palma, who attends film festivals as a fan, was in Toronto in 2006 checking out new films, including some shot on high-definition video by a company called HD-Net.

“A representative of HD-Net asked me if I was interested in making a $5 million movie for them. They said you can do anything you want but it has to be shot on HD. I was interested, if I could come up with something worth doing.

“Then I saw a very interesting Bruno Dumont movie, Flanders, that dealt with a squad of soldiers in what looked like Afghanistan and what they went through. And then I read about this incident, which was eerily familiar to Casualties of War. And when I went to search for the material I came up with all these unique expressions on the Internet—blogs, posted videos, websites, rants, news stories, it was all there.

“The facts of the case are undisputable—they’ve been reported in all news sources. My problem was that I couldn’t use the exact facts because the soldiers were being prosecuted, so I had to fictionalize everything. I couldn’t even use exact quotes, which was unfortunate.”

Though he is best known for pulling his audiences’s strings in violent but stylized films films like Carrie, The Untouchables and Scarface, De Palma cut his teeth on underground and experimental film in the 1960s. While some of his satirical work from that era broke through to a wider audience, like the Viet Nam era satires Greetings and Hi Mom, Redacted hearkens back in some ways to one of his least seen films. Dionysus in 69 was a filmed record of an avant garde theater performance, a modernized adaptation of Euripides’s Bacchae in which the performers were trained to improvise and interact with the audience.

De Palma wrote material for his prospective cast to use in auditions. The first part of Redacted to be filmed was the pseudo-documentary, in which a French film team is reporting on the checkpoint where the soldiers are stationed. (There’s a sly sense of parody in these scenes that a lot of reviewers seems to have missed, albeit one that does clash with the naked aggressiveness of much of the rest of the movie.) Because the cast didn’t have much to do at this stage, they spent the time rehearsing, riffing off of the audition material.

“In the process they bonded together,” De Palma recalls. “They had all this time to experiment, to improvise things, so by the time I got them, they had done these things over and over again, and could take them in any direction. Which is very much like Dionysius, where you didn’t know what was going to happen from one night to another.”

While Redacted finds a way to back away from showing too much of the horrific rape (who would go see such a film otherwise?), De Palma chose to end the movie with a montage of photographs of Iraqi war victims. (These are all real except for the image of the mutilated corpse of Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi, which was recreated by New York photographer Taryn Simon, and I have to say that I was relieved when De Palma told me it wasn’t real: It’s not an image I would ever want to see again.)

It was this montage that gave De Palma, who is otherwise proud of the film, his one gripe: Citing legal worries, his distributor forced him to black out the faces of the people in the photographs. “The irony of Redacted is that all the real photos are redacted. It drove me crazy. I got all these photos that nobody would print. But [the distributor was worried that] there might be a lawsuit from the relative of a dead Iraqi—they come up with all this mumbo jumbo.

“I didn’t redact those faces, the lawyers did. So I said, ‘Fine, it’s going to be your heavy black pencil across all those faces, let the whole world see what you’ve done.’ But what I’m learning from people who’ve seen the film is that it’s more horrifying that the faces are redacted. It really upsets people. But if you see the expressions on those people’s faces, it’s hard to bear.”