THE MAD SONGS OF FERNANDA HUSSEIN

Set in a different desert, the film presents three stories in three cities, as it follows characters whose lives get altered as a consequence of the war: a Mexican-American woman who has acquired the name Hussein through marriage; a teenage boy adrift in his anger, struggling to affect change; a returning veteran indelibly marked by what he has witnessed and participated in.

Working in the space between fiction and documentary, Gianvito's film seeks to resurrect the memory of a time that was too quickly filed away but whose tragic consequences continue to be felt, most profoundly among the twenty-two million people of Iraq. Historian Howard Zinn has called it "both a work of art and a critical piece of history ... thoroughly engaging as a story and provocative as an examination of American values."

"...stirring, smat, extraordinarily ambitious, and uncompromising in its radical politics...Fernanda Hussein is a major mitzvah: the first serious and successful narrative feature in years produced in the Boston area." - Gerald Peary, The Boston Phoenix

"...the most passionately political American movie in many years." - Cinema Scope

"...a powerful and moving act of bearing witness...I can't think of many other American independent features in recent years that have mattered as much to me." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader