Mission Quandary

Nine minutes, one landmine, a 3.4 in Montreal.

Nancy Snipper sat through the 2015 Montreal World Film Festival and scored Wei Jiang's short a 3.4 out of 4. She spelled the title Mission Quandry, one letter short, which is the kind of festival typo a nine-minute war film collects when nobody in the room has a press kit. Her plot notes are the fullest public record the movie has. Two soldiers. One of them, the superior, stands on a landmine. He orders the other man to keep moving so the airstrike can still happen. The junior wants to defuse the mine. An Iraqi woman asks to cross. The junior searches her against orders, shoots when she pulls something from her robe, finds a photograph and a bomb. She is still alive and shoots him back. He crawls onto the mine so the superior can step off and run. Then a plane hits the site. Snipper wrote that we are left to believe the superior finished the job and his partner died. She also wrote the film was "based on a true incident that happened in Iraq." That claim lives in her review. No named battle, date, or unit is attached to it on the public pages that discuss the short. Treat it as the critic's line, latestnetflix.com contends, not a verified after-action report.

Plex lists the English title as Mission Quandary, runtime 9 minutes, released September 3, 2015, short, drama, war. Wei Jiang directed, wrote, and produced. English databases keep a Chinese original title that translators render as a call of mission. The Chinese Plex page names the soldiers as reckless Jack and conservative superior Goldman, laser-guidance gear for an incoming airstrike, then the mine. It also calls the film a selection of the 39th Montreal World Film Festival. Snipper's festival roundup is the English confirmation that it screened there. TMDB keeps the same plot about Special Operatives Goodman and Lynch crossing Iraqi countryside to assist an air strike.,,

IMDbPro adds Fred Charles on screenplay with Jiang, and Tiannan Cai as composer. Movielogr romanizes the director as Weisi Jian, which is the same credit under a different spelling. Cast, per Plex and TMDB: John Winscher, Gregory DePetro, Vijaya Kumari. Winscher is the name that later turns up on other IMDb pages. American Academy of Dramatic Arts graduate, later guest spots on Cobra Kai, The Vampire Diaries, The Righteous Gemstones, Dynasty. In 2015 he was a short-film soldier in a Chinese-titled war miniature that played Montreal. DePetro and Kumari have almost no public footprint beyond this credit.,,,

There is no salary gossip because there is no studio publicity machine. No official trailer sits on a channel you can trust. The film sits on Plex with nowhere listed to watch it. What exists is a festival critic who liked the squeeze of the nine minutes, a Chinese title that never got a wide English campaign, and a true-incident label that nobody sourced. If you came looking for the 2015 Mission Impossible movie, you are in the wrong room. This one ends with a man on a mine and a plane that does not care who is still holding it down.