Two sides of the same coin?

Deborah Correa’s debut feature The War Between (2024), presents an usual setting for a Western, set in Arizona Territory early on in the American Civil War. It finds two soldiers from opposing allegiances, each stranded in the desert following a battle, forced to tolerate one another for the best chance of survival. Union abolitionist Israel (Damian Conrad-Davis) constantly degrades the Apache people, and the Confederate Moses (Sam Bullington) fights to continue the enslavement of Blacks and surprisingly has familiarised himself enough with the Apache to learn their language and advocates (against his Union counterpart) for the more humane treatment of the Apache Great Seer (Wayne Charles Baker).

With the premise, Correa and screenwriter Ron Yungul tee themselves up with what would appear to be a noble cause — the depolarisation of the current political atmosphere in the United States — but inadvertently sideline their project through the projection of 21st-century America onto the Civil War, a conflict over the right to enslave people based on their skin colour. The real-life stakes of the Civil War – enslavement – are minimised for a morally questionable pitch for bipartisanship and interpersonal harmony.

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