''Strip Search'' is a drama film made for the

HBO Home Box Office (HBO) is an American pay television service, which is the flagship property of namesake parent-subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc., itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The overall Home Box Office business unit is based a ...

network, first aired on April 27, 2004. The film explores the status of individual liberties in the aftermath of the

September 11, 2001 attacks The September 11 attacks, also known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing the first two into ...

and the approval of the USA PATRIOT Act. The film was directed by

Sidney Lumet Sidney Arthur Lumet ( ; June 25, 1924 – April 9, 2011) was an American film director. Lumet started his career in theatre before moving to film, where he gained a reputation for making realistic and gritty New York City, New York dramas w ...

and written by '' Oz'' creator

Tom Fontana Tom Fontana (born September 12, 1951) is an American screenwriter, writer, and television producer. Fontana worked on NBC's '' Homicide: Life on the Street'' and created HBO's ''Oz.'' Early life and education Fontana was born on the west si ...

. It stars

Glenn Close Glenda Veronica Close (born March 19, 1947) is an American actress. In a career spanning over five decades on Glenn Close on screen and stage, screen and stage, she has received List of awards and nominations received by Glenn Close, numerous ac ...

Maggie Gyllenhaal Margalit Ruth "Maggie" Gyllenhaal ( , ; born November 16, 1977) is an American actress and filmmaker. Part of the Gyllenhaal family, she is the daughter of filmmakers Stephen Gyllenhaal and Naomi Achs, and the older sister of actor Jake Gylle ...

, Ken Leung, Bruno Lastra and

Dean Winters Dean Gerard Winters (born July 20, 1964) is an American actor. He is known for his role as Ryan O'Reily on the HBO prison drama '' Oz'' and his roles in the TV series ''Millennium'','' Rescue Me'', ''30 Rock'', ''Sex and the City'', and '' Law & ...

. The film initially was screened at the Monaco International Film Festival with Lumet presenting it in the presence of Fontana. Different cuts of the film exist. There is supposedly a two-hour version. German TV showed an 86-minute version. The version released on DVD in the U.S. is 56 minutes.

Plot

The film is built around two main parallel stories, each containing almost identical dialogues. One story line involves Linda Sykes (Gyllenhaal), an American woman detained in the

People's Republic of China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

, being interrogated by a military officer (Leung). In the other storyline, Sharif Bin Said (Lastra), an Arab man detained in New York City, is interrogated by two

FBI The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and Federal law enforcement in the United States, its principal federal law enforcement ag ...

agents (Winters and Close). Both characters are graduate students detained with no hard evidence and interrogated about unspecified activities which may or may not be related to

terrorist Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war aga ...

plots. In the course of the increasingly brutal interrogations, both Sykes and Bin Said are

strip search A strip search is a practice of searching a person for weapons or other contraband suspected of being hidden on their body or inside their clothing, and not found by performing a frisk search, but by requiring the person to remove some or al ...

ed against their will by their interrogators and are subjected to a cavity search. In both cases the protagonists appear to have only tenuous connections with the suspected terrorist plots. The film ends with the question: "Must security and safety come at the price of freedom?"

Cast

as Karen Moore *

as Linda Sykes * Ken Leung as Liu Tsung-Yuan *Bruno Lastra as Sharif Bin Said *

as Ned McGrath * Peter Jacobson as John Scanlon *

Austin Pendleton Austin Campbell Pendleton (born March 27, 1940) is an American actor, playwright, theatre director, and instructor. Pendleton is known as a prolific character actor on the stage and screen, whose six-decade career has included roles in films i ...

as James Perley * Tom Guiry as Gerry Sykes *

Fred Kohler Fredrick Louis Kohler (April 20, 1888 – October 28, 1938) was an American actor. Career Fred Kohler was born in Kansas City, Missouri or in Dubuque, Iowa. As a teen, he began to pursue a career in vaudeville, but worked other jobs to suppor ...

as Jimmy Briggs * Christopher McCann as Nicholas Hudson *

Nelson Lee Nelson Lee (born October 16, 1975; Chinese name: 李志傑) is a Taiwanese-Canadian actor. He is best known for portraying Senator Hamato Xiono in ''Ahsoka'', and Dragon King in '' Stargirl''. Life and career Lee was born in Taipei, Taiwan on O ...

as Xiu-Juan Chang *Ramsey Faragallah as Abdul Amin *Daniel May Wong as Arresting Officer

References

External links

* *
Strip Search DVD on Amazon.com
{{DEFAULTSORT:Strip Search (Film) 2004 television films American political drama films 2004 drama films 2004 films Films shot in New Jersey Works about the war on terror Films directed by Sidney Lumet HBO Films films 2000s American films 2000s English-language films