Shadow Company
Encyclopedia
Shadow Company is a documentary
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 directed by Nick Bicanic and Jason Bourque and narrated by Gerard Butler
Gerard Butler
Gerard James Butler is a Scottish actor who has appeared on film, stage, and television. A trained lawyer, Butler turned to acting in the mid-1990s with small roles in productions such as the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies , which he followed with steady work on television, most notably in...

. It is an introduction to the mercenary
Mercenary
A mercenary, is a person who takes part in an armed conflict based on the promise of material compensation rather than having a direct interest in, or a legal obligation to, the conflict itself. A non-conscript professional member of a regular army is not considered to be a mercenary although he...

 and private military company
Private military company
A private military company or provides military and security services. These combatants are commonly known as mercenaries, though modern-day PMCs refer to their staff as security contractors, private military contractors or private security contractors, and refer to themselves as private military...

 industry, concentrating on the role the industry has been playing in recent conflicts. It was released on DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

 on August 2006
2006 in film
- Highest-grossing films :Please note that following the tradition of the English-language film industry, these are the top-grossing films that were first released in the United States in 2006...

.

Content

The documentary film is not presented with a complete voice narrative nor a linear story-telling structure. Instead, most of the documentary deals with the issues presented in a topical fashion. There are three primary methods that the filmmakers use to organize and present information. The first is through the personal account of a security contractor named James Ashcroft, the second is to pose questions and directly answer them, and the third method is to utilize small case studies. The film contains footage of mercenary and private military soldiers training in Iraq
Iraq
Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....

. Director Nick Bicanic was invited to a Senate Committee Hearing to testify on the subject of mercenaries/private military companies on September 21, 2007.

Letters from James

At certain intervals in the documentary, the audience is read different letter excerpts from a security contractor named James Ashcroft (voiced by Gerard Butler
Gerard Butler
Gerard James Butler is a Scottish actor who has appeared on film, stage, and television. A trained lawyer, Butler turned to acting in the mid-1990s with small roles in productions such as the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies , which he followed with steady work on television, most notably in...

). The letter scenes explain the details of James's work and life in Iraq and a small amount of his personal history. Much of the comedy from the documentary is displayed in these scenes. In addition, the letters serve as an opener and a closer for the interview portions of the documentary.

One scene displays a quick montage of James’s life up to Iraq. The viewer finds out James Ashcroft was a graduate of Oxford University. Sometime after graduation, he joined the British military and performed bodyguard work in Milan and Paris later on. When the audience listens to his first letter, they find out that he quit his last job at a law firm before heading to Iraq.

His new line of work in Iraq involves being a security contractor for a reputable private military company. He says he is on a ‘six on three off rotation’, which means he works for six weeks, before getting three weeks of off time, and the letters are written in the six week time frame. Also, he mentions working out of a villa in the Green Zone
Green Zone
The Green Zone is the most common name for the International Zone of Baghdad. It is a area of central Baghdad, Iraq, that was the governmental center of the Coalition Provisional Authority and remains the center of the international presence in the city...

, the area where the Coalition Provisional Authority
Coalition Provisional Authority
The Coalition Provisional Authority was established as a transitional government following the invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies, members of the Multi-National Force – Iraq which was formed to oust the government of Saddam Hussein in 2003...

 resides.

Ashcroft shares how his firm procures weapons like AK-47
AK-47
The AK-47 is a selective-fire, gas-operated 7.62×39mm assault rifle, first developed in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Kalashnikov. It is officially known as Avtomat Kalashnikova . It is also known as a Kalashnikov, an "AK", or in Russian slang, Kalash.Design work on the AK-47 began in the last year...

s and PKM
PK machine gun
The PK is a 7.62 mm general-purpose machine gun designed in the Soviet Union and currently in production in Russia. The PK machine gun was introduced in the 1960s and replaced the SGM and RPD machine guns in Soviet service...

s from the Sadr City
Sadr City
Sadr City is a suburb district of the city of Baghdad, Iraq. It was built in 1959 by Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qassim and later unofficially renamed Sadr City after deceased Shia leader Mohammad Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr....

 bazaar, and how the US military or his firm deals with insurgents. James Ashcroft's autobiography
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...

, Making A Killing, written with the ghostwriter Clifford Thurlow
Clifford Thurlow
Clifford Thurlow trained as a journalist after failing to get a place at Cambridge and wrote his first book at age 23. He has been described by Penny Wark of The Times as "one of the UK's best ghostwriters."...

 was published by Virgin in the UK in 2006 and the US in 2007.

Part of the proceeds of the DVD sales go to the Cape Community Elementary School in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Interviewees

Listed in the press release http://www.shadowcompanythemovie.com/pressbits/shadow_release_WEB.pdf:
  • P. W. Singer, senior analyst of the Brookings Institution
    Brookings Institution
    The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, D.C., in the United States. One of Washington's oldest think tanks, Brookings conducts research and education in the social sciences, primarily in economics, metropolitan policy, governance, foreign policy, and...

  • Alan W. Bell, president of Globe Risk
  • Robert Young Pelton
    Robert Young Pelton
    Robert Young Pelton , is an author, journalist and documentary filmmaker. Pelton is considered an adventurer and a "witness" to conflict. Pelton is known for overcoming extraordinary obstacles in his search for the truth...

    , author and adventurer
  • Madelaine Drohan, author and journalist
  • Ian Church, adventurer
  • Phil Lancaster, Major (Ret.) of the Canadian Forces
    Canadian Forces
    The Canadian Forces , officially the Canadian Armed Forces , are the unified armed forces of Canada, as constituted by the National Defence Act, which states: "The Canadian Forces are the armed forces of Her Majesty raised by Canada and consist of one Service called the Canadian Armed Forces."...

     (aide of Roméo Dallaire
    Roméo Dallaire
    Lieutenant-General Roméo Antonius Dallaire, is a Canadian senator, humanitarian, author and retired general...

     during UNAMIR)
  • Slavko Ilic, security contractor
  • Cobus Claassens, security contractor
  • Neall Elliss, private military contractor
  • Doug Brooks, IPOA president http://ipoaonline.org/en/aboutus/staff.htm
  • Stephen J. Cannell
    Stephen J. Cannell
    Stephen Joseph Cannell was an American television producer, writer, novelist and occasional actor, and the founder of Stephen J. Cannell Productions.-Early life:...

    , producer, creator of The A-Team
    The A-Team
    The A-Team is an American action adventure television series about a fictional group of ex-United States Army Special Forces personnel who work as soldiers of fortune, while on the run from the Army after being branded as war criminals for a "crime they didn't commit". The A-Team was created by...

  • Eike-Henner W. Kluge, professor of ethics
  • Frances Stonor Saunders
    Frances Stonor Saunders
    Frances Hélène Jeanne Stonor Saunders is a British journalist and historian.A few years after graduating with a first-class Honours degree in English from St Anne's College, Oxford, she embarked on a career as a television film-maker...

    , author and historian
  • John F. Mullins, soldier of fortune
  • Tasha Bradsell, journalist

External links

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