Atonement Brings True Iraq Story to Toronto With Abbass, Branagh and Holbrook

Reed Van Dyk's Iraq War drama Atonement is screening at the Toronto International Film Festival after its premiere at Cannes, with Hiam Abbass starring alongside Kenneth Branagh and Boyd Holbrook, according to Deadline.

The film is set in Baghdad in 2003, during the United States presence in the city. The story starts with a checkpoint shooting.

It is built on the reporting of Dexter Filkins. The starting point was his New York Times dispatch headlined 'For a Family in Iraq, 3 Deaths In a Moment of Confusion', and the film then dramatises his 2012 New Yorker follow-up about the Marine machine gunner trying to find the family and apologise, Deadline reported.

The family at the centre were the Kachadoorians, members of Iraq's Armenian Christian minority. In the film their surname is fictionalised as Khachaturian. Abbass plays Mariam, the matriarch. Branagh plays Michael Reid, a newsman based on Filkins. Holbrook plays a Marine sharpshooter living with post-traumatic stress disorder, a mental health condition linked to trauma. Gheed also appears in the ensemble alongside the three leads.

Abbass was born in Nazareth and has said she is the fifth child among her siblings. She said she had no exchange whatsoever with the Kachadoorian family while preparing for the role. That left her to build Mariam from Filkins's reporting and the script rather than from direct contact.

North American distribution rights, meaning control of the cinema and related release in the United States and Canada, have been acquired by Kino Lorber, Deadline reported in July.

For viewers coming to it fresh, the chain is unusually clear. A 2003 news report led to a 2012 magazine revisit, and now to a festival drama that keeps the real names close but not identical.