![]() Excepting a few visual flourishes to provide atmosphere, nothing happens in the scene except for the reading of Katharine’s charges. As the movie progresses, we learn that the truly impactful legal proceeding is not the case against Katharine, but rather the case that her lawyers bring against the government for the very idea of keeping “official secrets.” Representative governments are supposed to work for the people, not the other way around, and that means transparency is essential.Īnother noteworthy aspect of this particular opening scene is its ruthless efficiency. It is about the larger topic of governments hiding the truth from the public. Among other things, this storytelling choice establishes that Official Secrets is about more than just Katharine Gun, the individual. When Katharine is asked how she wishes to plead, the movie cuts to black and presents a “One Year Earlier” card, then proceeds into the story proper. The first scene of Official Secrets features Katharine in court for a presentation of the charge against her-violating the Official Secrets Act. ![]() ![]() When employed properly, it works incredibly well to establish narrative tension from the first frames of a movie. Nonetheless, Official Secrets provides yet another example of why this maneuver is standard. Opening a movie with the tease of a scene that won’t conclude until the end of the movie is such a standard screenwriting maneuver that it’s easy to take the technique for granted. Based on the book “The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War” by Marcia and Thomas Mitchell, and adapted for the screen by Gregory Bernstein, Sara Bernstein, and Gavin Hood (who also directed), Official Secrets offers a crisp demonstration of how to tell a whistleblower story-and how, more generally speaking, to transform any sprawling real-life event into a taut cinematic narrative. Official Secrets, a new UK/US co-production starring Keira Knightley as Katharine, dramatizes these events while also providing context that speaks to issues of duplicity, manipulation, politics and race. A month later, after the memo was printed in the London Observer, Katharine confessed to the leak and spent a night in jail before enduring a year-long ordeal during which the English government considered whether to formally charge her with a crime that carried a significant prison sentence. Incensed by the immoral content of the memo, Katharine knowingly violated England’s Official Secrets Act by printing a copy of the document and slipping it to a third party who, in turn, passed the memo along to a sympathetic journalist. Bush’s push for war in Iraq, even though the supposed principal justification for military action-Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction-was far from verified. The memo asked British spies to blackmail members of the United Nations Security Council into supporting U.S. ![]() In 2003, Katharine Gun, a translator working for British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), encountered an alarming memo sent from the United States intelligence community. ![]()
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