After the culmination of the long-running mafia series The Sopranos, James Gandolfini, who played the Italian-American crime boss Tony Soprano, will return to the TV loop with a documentary about the survival experiences of the U.S. veterans of the Iraq war entitled “Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq.”
Scheduled to premiere on Sunday, September 9 on HBO, the war documentary will feature Gandolfini’s interviews with 10 American GIs narrating their stories in the combat zone, as well as their near encounters with death.
Gandolfini, a three-time Emmy award-winning actor, has worked is many movies prior to his iconic mob boss role on The Sopranos. Some of his acting credits include 8mm, True Romance, The Mexican and Get Shorty.
“Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq,” which is the debut project from Gandolfini’s Attaboy Films production company, also features the Sopranos star as the executive producer. According to HBO, the 45-year old actor has produced the documentary from a series of in-studio interviews with Iraq war veterans earlier this year, bringing light on ”their feelings on their future, their severe disabilities and their devotion to America.”
While this is Gandolfini’s first role as a producer with his own company, this is not his first time working with soldiers. In the past, he has actually visited U.S. troops in Iraq on behalf of the USO. As for HBO, the cable channel also has a lot of experience with war-themed documentaries, including, “Baghdad ER” and “Last Letters Home: Voices of American Troops from the Battlefields of Iraq.”
Next in line for Gandolfini is a film that gives him the opportunity to portray Ernest Hemmingway in a plot focused on the writer’s passionate romance with war journalist Martha Gellhorn, who was the novelist’s third wife.
-Kris De Leon, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
Source: MSNBC
(Photo Courtesy of Associated Press)
Staff Writer, BuddyTV
