— For Home Use Only —

Human Terrain is two stories in one. The first exposes a new Pentagon effort to enlist the best and the brightest in a struggle for hearts and minds. Facing long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military initiates Human Terrain Systems—a controversial program that seeks to make cultural awareness the centerpiece of the new counterinsurgency strategy. Designed to embed social scientists with combat troops, the program swiftly comes under attack as a misguided and unethical effort to gather intelligence and target enemies. Gaining rare access to wargames in the Mojave Desert and training exercises at Quantico and Fort Leavenworth, HUMAN TERRAIN takes the viewer into the heart of the war machine and a shadowy collaboration between American academics and the military.

The other story is about a brilliant young scholar who leaves the university to join a Human Terrain team. After working as a humanitarian activist in the Western Sahara, Balkans, East Timor and elsewhere, and winning a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford, Michael Bhatia returns to Brown University to take up a visiting fellowship. In the course of conducting research on military cultural awareness, he is recruited by the Human Terrain program and eventually embeds with the 82nd Airborne in eastern Afghanistan. On the way to mediate an intertribal dispute, Bhatia is killed when his humvee hits a roadside bomb.

War becomes academic, academics go to war, and the personal tragically merges with the political, raising new questions about the ethics, effectiveness, and high costs of counterinsurgency.

Presented by Bullfrog Films
Directed by James Der Derian, David Udris and Michael Udris
Camera/Editing: David Udris, Michael Udris
Executive Producer: James Der Derian
Produced by Udris Film and Oxyopia Productions in collaboration with The Global Media Project with support from The Carnegie Corporation of New York and by The Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University

Educational Use at www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/humt.html
Campus and Community Screenings at www.bullfrogcommunities.com/humanterrain