Venable is pleased to announce that The Response won the 2009 Audience Award for Best Film at the "Politics on Film" festival. The inaugural festival attracted hundreds of filmmakers, lawmakers, and audience members throughout the weekend of May 7, 2009. The Audience Award was selected by festival pass holders and accepted by Venable attorney Sig Libowitz, writer and producer of The Response, on the last day of the festival.
The Response was executive produced by Venable in association with The University of Maryland School of Law. The film is a courtroom drama based, in part, on declassified transcripts of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) held on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The film stars Aasif Mandvi (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart), Kate Mulgrew (Captain Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager) and Peter Riegert (Animal House, The Sopranos), and has been accepted into seven Academy Award qualifying film festivals.
"Politics on Film" is a project of the Washington Political Film Foundation. It is an annual, bipartisan film festival based in Washington, DC dedicated to providing a platform for films that tell stories of America's politics and policies. The festival celebrates the power of film to educate and motivate, as well as entertain. The Festival also celebrates the historic and ongoing legacy of films about American government and democracy, as well as related stories and themes from an international perspective.