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HUMAN TERRAIN: WAR BECOMES ACADEMIC examines and questions the US military's new counterinsurgency initiative, 'Human Terrain Systems', under which social scientists are embedded with combat troops.

HUMAN TERRAIN is two stories in one. The first exposes a new Pentagon effort to enlist the best and the brightest in a struggle for hearts and minds. Facing long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military initiates 'Human Terrain Systems', a controversial program that seeks to make cultural awareness the centerpiece of the new counterinsurgency strategy. Designed to embed social scientists with combat troops, the program swiftly comes under attack as a misguided and unethical effort to gather intelligence and target enemies. Gaining rare access to war-games in the Mojave Desert and training exercises at Quantico and Fort Leavenworth, HUMAN TERRAIN takes the viewer into the heart of the war machine and a shadowy collaboration between American academics and the military.

The other story is about a brilliant young scholar who leaves the university to join a Human Terrain team. After working as a humanitarian activist in the Western Sahara, Balkans, East Timor and elsewhere, and winning a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford, Michael Bhatia returns to Brown University to take up a visiting fellowship. In the course of conducting research on military cultural awareness, he is recruited by the Human Terrain program and eventually embeds with the 82nd Airborne in eastern Afghanistan. On the way to mediate an intertribal dispute, Bhatia is killed when his humvee hits a roadside bomb. War becomes academic, academics go to war, and the personal tragically merges with the political, raising new questions about the ethics, effectiveness, and high costs of counterinsurgency.

There are two versions of this program on the same DVD: 84 and 57 minutes
SDH Captioning for the Deaf & Hard-of-Hearing

Directed by James Der Derian, David Udris & Michael Udris
Produced by Udris Film & Oxyopia Productions
Executive Producer: James Der Derian

Screening options: $29.95 Home Use House Party DVD purchase (private use only) COMMUNITY SCREENINGS (single events with license to charge admission) $100 Small Community Screening (1-50 people) $200 Medium Community Screening (51-100 people) $350 Large Community Screening (100+ people)