Grace is Gone, starring John Cusack in an award-winning performance about a father who does not want to tell his two daughters that their mother, a sergeant in the Iraq war, was killed in the line of duty.

Aside from winning the audience award at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, the haunting music in the film received two Golden Globe nominations by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for the 65th Golden Globe Awards with Clint Eastwood, who composed the score, being nominated for Best Original Score, while the song "Grace is Gone" with music by Eastwood and lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager was nominated for Best Original Song.

It has also won the Satellite Award for Best Song at the 12th Satellite Awards and Clint Eastwood was further nominated for the Critics Choice Award for Best Composer at the 2008 Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards.

The contemplative, understated tearjerker, GRACE IS GONE, dramatizes the quiet crisis that befalls Stanley (John Cusack), a young Midwestern husband of a female marine stationed in Iraq, and a father of two girls.

Stanley is unexpectedly widowed when his wife, Grace, is killed on the battlefield. Stanley cannot bring himself to share the devastating news with his two young daughters so instead takes the girls on a road trip, while he attempts to sort through a myriad of conflicted and tumultuous internal feelings about the war itself and contemplates how to break the shattering news.

This film represents the brainchild of producer-star Cusack and writer-director James C. Strouse, who received the Critics Award for Best Screenplay at the 2007 Deauville Film Festival, the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award Sundance 2007 and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize for Best Drama at the same festival.

It began with Cusack's fury about the Bush administration's policy banning footage of caskets returned from the Iraq and Afghani wars, and his desire to see those events played out onscreen, in the lives of American citizens.

Since May 2005, Cusack has been an occasional contributing blogger at The Huffington Post, a liberal online news website and weblog founded by Arianna Huffington. Cusack has written extensively on his opposition to the war in Iraq and his disdain for the Bush administration. 

"Devoid of vanity, with no hidden agendas, he (John Cusack) never strains to be likable. Good will, integrity and a native common sense ooze out of him." Stephen Holden-New York Times.

THE ART OF ORIGINAL FILMMAKING

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