Defying the odds to put female spin on war

It’s hard enough to scratch together a screenwriting career, and even harder to get a film produced and up on the screen. In this environment, the lack of a Y chromosome can be another major liability, and -- to add insult to injury -- female filmmakers remain largely absent from the frustratingly predictable award-season roundelay. (Iris Yamashita’s screenplay for “Letters From Iwo Jima” is the only work represented in the writing categories.)

But in an atmosphere that seems to encourage women to burn their few opportunities on writing (or rewriting) the next romantic comedy, screenwriters like Wendell Steavenson (“The Situation”) and Deborah Kampmeier (“Hounddog”) -- and a host of other hard-working industry women -- are writing powerful, searching films that were realized in the face of tremendous obstacles.

Steavenson is an author, world traveler and freelance war correspondent whose need to be a witness has driven her to decamp in some uninviting places. It conveys a lot about the 36-year-old journalist that when she got burned out from scrambling around Baghdad and Kurdistan-Iraq, before and after the American invasion in 2003 and needed a relaxing breather, she went to Tehran. Steavenson had been freelancing for the Daily Telegraph, Time (where she used to work), Slate and Opendemocracy.com when director Philip Haas (“Angels and Insects,” “The Music of Chance”) read a dialogue with an insurgent that Steavenson had published in Granta and asked her to write a screenplay set in Iraq.

“The Situation,” Steavenson’s only attempt at the format, is a war film with almost no battle scenes. Its conflicts are mostly those of ordinary people trying to confront the chaos around them. The film takes the viewer into the backstage dealings and shifting allegiances of soldiers on the ground, local Samarra sheiks and other regional power brokers, intelligence officials in the Green Zone, journalists, Iraqi policemen and militia members, diplomatic exiles and informants -- all portrayed with some level of sympathy as they try to survive a miserable situation.

“It’s a fictional mash that came out of my experiences there,” Steavenson says. “None is literally true, but there are fag ends of conversations or places or people that I met or knew or talked to or saw all the way through it.”

Shot in Morocco (the film opens at the ArcLight on Friday), the movie begins with two Iraqi youngsters encountering an agitated American patrol and being thrown off a bridge. One drowns, and as Anna -- an American journalist played by Connie Nielsen -- investigates, it says everything about “the situation” that this crime quickly gets washed away in a larger sea of corruption, futility and escalating atrocities.

“The Situation” is the first feature film to explore the complicated ground-level terrain of the occupation inside Iraq, fueled as it is by Steavenson’s firsthand observations. A slew of developing fictional films hopes to illuminate other tragic aspects of the war and its repercussions. Among them: “In the Valley of Elah,” based on Mark Boal’s Playboy expose; “Death and Dishonor,” which “Crash” writer-director Paul Haggis is currently shooting; “Last Man Home,” written by Jamie Moss, which Universal and Imagine picked up two years ago; “Stop Loss,” co-written by writer-director Kimberly Peirce (“Boys Don’t Cry”), who has been in Texas shooting the drama based on the true-life exploits of her brother; “The Invisible World,” the story of a female journalist taken captive in Iraq, written by “City of Angels” scribe Dana Stevens; and the completed “Grace Is Gone,” a low-budget domestic drama written by James C. Strouse that was picked up by the Weinstein Co. for $4 million at Sundance last month.

Over the last few years, Steavenson has returned to Iraq several times -- including as recently as early 2005, when she finished this script while barricaded inside the semi-fortified Al Hamra Hotel -- and like Anna in the film, she has struggled to figure out how to report on the accelerating daily tragedies.

“On one level, what you’re seeing is extraordinary, and on one level what you’re seeing is quite familiar to you,” Steavenson says. “There was a time when I would go to a car-bomb site every two days

“You get used to anything,” she goes on. “So you’re not struggling, but you then struggle trying to interpret that for an audience who is somewhere else. You become very dislocated from anyone sitting in London or New York and picking up their paper in the morning.”

Though she was born in New York and grew up in London, Steavenson hasn’t had a permanent home since 1998. Most recently living in Beirut until the breakout of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah last summer, Steavenson has now isolated herself in a phoneless Paris apartment while she finishes a nonfiction book about a Baathist general’s family that she’s been reporting for three years. (Steavenson published a book in 2002 called “Stories I Stole,” about her experiences living in the dilapidated former Soviet Georgia in the late ‘90s.)

Of the impulse to push herself into dangerous terrain physically and creatively, Steavenson says: “When you see something dramatic and important up close, it’s a great privilege. To talk to people, to see things, to be a witness is a great privilege. As a writer, particularly if you’re interested in issues of morality and history and conflict, like me, you want to see it. Because the only way you understand it is to see it as close as you can.”

‘Hounddog’s’ roller-coaster ride

No one could blame writer-director Deborah Kampmeier (“Virgin”) for being just a little worn down.

Her new Southern gothic drama, “Hounddog,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival two weeks ago but which still does not have a distributor, had its financing collapse too many times to count over the 10 years she’s been trying to make it. Then, before anyone had seen the film, it drew apoplectic condemnation for a scene that depicts a 12-year-old girl’s rape.

“Hounddog” centers on Lewellen, a preteen girl played by Dakota Fanning, who is growing up in a grim household run by her abusive father and batty grandmother in rural 1950s Alabama. Fixated on Elvis Presley and his music, Lewellen freely inches into her burgeoning sexuality only to be violated by a local boy.

“The response was not without passion,” Kampmeier says diplomatically and with no little weariness a few days after the festival’s end. “And that’s what you want to touch in people is their passions, right?”

(Passions, yes; hysterias, no. At least one critic fatuously took the film to task in part because the culprit is never accused or apprehended, and the victim never tells anyone, denying the heroine and the audience a tidy little resolution. Because, really, who would ever believe a rapist could go without punishment or a victim could remain silent?)

Kampmeier sees an interesting similarity between the furor over her film and the narrative itself. “The film is about the silencing of one girl’s voice and then her reclaiming that voice in a more powerful way, in a way that connects her deeply to herself and she’s able then to walk away from this world that could hurt her,” Kampmeier says. “It feels like the response is very parallel to what happens in the film -- there’s a silencing of a woman’s voice that I find very troubling.”

Kampmeier says that the intensity of the subject matter has prompted many audience members, of both genders, to have powerful emotional responses and speak to her of their deep connection to the film’s geographical and psychological terrain. In this way, it’s touched the same nerve as Alexander Stuart’s incest drama, “The War Zone,” directed by Tim Roth, which provoked similar visceral reactions -- both positive and negative -- at the Toronto Film Festival in 1999.

Kampmeier, 42, a Tennessee native who grew up in Georgia and Alabama before heading to New York City at 18, says she finds inspiration in the work of filmmakers such as Julie Taymor and Jane Campion, who combine rawness and poetry in their efforts to tell challenging stories about women’s lives.

“I’m a woman, and I’m telling stories that are close to my heart,” Kampmeier says. “I think they speak for a lot of women whose voices are not represented in this medium at all. I don’t care if you approve or disapprove of the voice or you hate it or love it, we still need to create the space for women’s voices to be heard.”

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Scriptland is a weekly feature on the work and professional lives of screenwriters. For tips and comments, e-mail fernandez_jay@hotmail.com.