"Wait, was that the night we were all pole-dancing at subMercer?" asks director Kimberly Peirce, the visionary behind Boy's Don't Cry and this year's Stop-Loss. She laughs from her belly, and it's incongruous, given that I'm here as her guest, to watch her accept the Andrew Sarris Award at Columbia University, her alma mater. After a montage sequence that projects her most moving scenes for a crowd of aspiring filmmakers and aging professors, Peirce takes to the stage. She scans the room, and says, "People always ask me for advice, for that one thing that might help them 'make it' in film." Aside from truth and passion and all the ideals that one learns in film school, she shrugs her shoulders and jumps into an anecdote about how she found herself hitting rock-bottom on national television.

She watched as her 18-year-old brother packed his bags for Iraq. She listened while soldiers chronicled their devastating accounts of being kept in combat against their will. Simply put, the acclaimed director of Boy's Don't Cry has earned the right to sound off with Stop-Loss, a brutal look at lives lost in war. Below, Peirce opens fire.