Film on trauma of troops back from Iraq hits Venice

The scars from the Iraq war do not heal when US soldiers return home, says a powerful new film starring Tommy Lee Jones that keeps the conflict at the heart of the Venice film festival this year.

After Brian De Palma's Redacted stunned audiences with its reconstruction of horrific events in Iraq, Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah brings a more nuanced, yet moving account of the brutality some soldiers bring back to the United States.

Jones has the critics searching for the superlatives as a man whose son is murdered after returning from Iraq, and as he pieces together what happened, the Vietnam war veteran begins to question his faith in his country and its policies. One of the defining images of the film is the American flag flying upside down, a sign of a nation in distress.

Haggis said he had tried not to allow his personal opinion about the war in Iraq to influence Elah too heavily.

"We set about to make a political film certainly, but not a partisan film," he told a news conference in Venice, where the film has its world premiere yesterday.

He said that although support for the Iraq war had waned in the United States, he began putting Elah together when the invasion was still popular.