Actor/producer-turned-attorney Sig Libowitz, and director Adam Rodgers have shown a keen understanding of the one element missing from most courtroom dramas: restraint. While courtroom scenes in movies and television shows often have glaring factual inaccuracies, there is nothing more cringeworthy than when the filmmakers indulge in high-pitched drama in a forum which is governed by decorum. (You know what I’m talking about, go ahead and say it: “You can’t handle the truth!”)
For The Response, a 30-minute short which Libowitz screened tonight to a very receptive audience at the American Bar Association’s headquarters in Chicago, the exercise of restraint is all the more laudable because the film’s intended audience is broad. Based upon the available transcripts of administrative detention hearings held at Guantánamo Bay, The Response opens in a fictionalized hearing of a detainee who, after several years of detention, is finally being given a hearing to determine whether or not he is an enemy combatant. The real source of drama here (and in most courtrooms) is the revelation of the shocking truth: that the detainee is given no access to the identity of the witnesses who have accused his involvement in terrorism – witnesses who were likely subjected to torture and/or were provided financial incentives to name names. If that sounds like the activity of a time and place far-removed than your notion of America, you can see why Rodgers and Libowitz (who plays one of the three administrative judges, along side Star Trek Voyager’s Kate Mulgrew and veteran character actor Peter Riegert) were right to play this story as straight as possible.  While that effort runs slightly askew into preachy territory in the short’s second half (during the private deliberations of the judges), the overall result is as balanced a presentation as this charged material could hope to see. The filmmakers hope to see it on the next Oscars ballot. Regardless, The Response should be required viewing for anyone who cares about the slow, steady, and quiet erosion of legal protection that is being orchestrated in the name of national security.
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
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