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The Sydney Morning Herald January 14, 1999
Valhalla goes out in a blaze of glory
This is the last hurrah for the Valhalla, the final film release before the cinema closes on February 28. With Waco: The Rules of Engagement, the Valhalla closes with a bang, not a whimper. This is one of the most compelling, disturbing and engrossing films of the past two years, but none of the mainstream cinemas would touch it, even the art houses. The Val has a long history of supporting difficult and original feature films, often turning them into hits, but more than that, owner Chris Kiely was one of the few who supported great documentaries. Films such as Rats in the Ranks, Black Harvest, Simone de Beau-voir, Gate of Heavenly Peace and Visions of Light reached a much wider public because the Val gave them a theatrical release. With its closure goes one of the last truly independent cinemas in Sydney. Films such as Waco: will now be seen only on TV, if at all (or possibly at the Chauvel). Paradoxically, Waco: demonstrates why we need independent cinemas. It's the story of the siege of Waco, Texas, in early 1993, during which four Federal officers and 76 Branch Davidian Christians - men, women and children-- died in an inferno of biblical proportions. Among the allegations the film makes: that the raid by Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms officers searching for illegal firearms was partly motivated by the bureau's need to make a big publicity score just before its budget hearings; that the fire which destroyed the Branch Davidian compound after the 51-day siege was lit not by the people inside, as the FBI later claimed, but by officers outside firing shots into a building full of highly flammable tear gas; that tanks with bulldozer blades damaged the buildings beforehand, which had the effect, deliberate or not, of making the fire more intense; that people running from the back of the buildings, where TV cameras could not see them, were gunned down by shots fired from tanks; that the cover-up of evidence contradicting the official story has been systematic and effective, with various key pieces of evidence disappearing. The film was made by three Los Angeles-based film-makers, two of them former TV current affairs reporters, and its tone is notably unhysterical. They have sifted through a huge amount of publicly available footage, from congressional subcommittee hearings to news footage, to the FBI's own infra-red video shot from aircraft above the blaze, then gone out to talk to key witnesses, many of whom disagree with the official story. "Basically, they were good people," says the local sheriff, Jack Harwell, contradicting the spin campaign afterwards, which painted the Davidians as a suicidal, sexually deviant cult led by a mad-man, David Koresh. The most affecting material in the movie comes in the audio recordings of conversations between FBI negotiators and those trapped inside. "Jim, you're a damned liar," Koresh yells at one point, when the FBI man claims there are no guns on the helicopters flying overhead. By the end of this exchange, the FBI man has conceded there are guns, but they're not mounted and they're not firing. He sounds about as convincing as the FBI man at the later congressional investigation who says: "We never fired one single round of ammunition." Waco: was the unexpected hit of last year's Sydney Film Festival. On the audience questionnaire results, it was the most popular of all the 200 films, not just the most popular documentary. All praise to the Valhalla for reviving it, and for all the films over all the years. Vale the Val.
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