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HOLLYWOOD: Four years after filmmaker Michael Moore
was booed off the stage for protesting the war in Iraq, movies about
the conflict are poised to take center stage at Sunday’s 79th
Academy Awards ceremony.
Moore was roundly condemned for
making a political statement in 2003 when he collected his Oscar for
Bowling for Columbine, accusing US President George W. Bush of
waging a “fictitious” war.
But in a reflection of the
changing mood against the war, Oscars voters have embraced two
documentaries which paint a bleakly critical picture of US policy in
Iraq, Iraq in Fragments and My Country, My Country.
Both films are among the five
nominees for the best documentary Oscar at this year’s awards on
February 25, where they are up against the favorite, Al Gore’s
environmental rallying cry, An Inconvenient Truth.
For Iraq in Fragments, director
James Longley spent two years in Iraq, and in shooting 300 hours of
footage he tried to capture the effects of the conflict on everyday
Iraqis.
The film that emerges—three
30-minute segments reflecting the lives of Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish
Iraqis—is a startling portrait of a country wrestling with the
horrors of war.
“Most of the people we see are
people who are mostly not in combat,” Longley said in an
interview. “The film is not so much about the Americans as it is
about the Iraqis and the big issues they’re dealing with in their
country.”
Longley, who believes the United
States should withdraw from the country, said current policy is
having “the opposite effect people think it is.”
“It has served to divide the
country against itself,” said the 34-year-old Seattle native.
“The Iraqis have managed their affairs for thousands of years, and
they can in our absence.”
Longley is now keen to make a
similar documentary about Iran, believing that the United States is
preparing for a military strike against Iraq’s neighbor, citing
the failure to withdraw US troops from Iraq as evidence.
“Why are we staying? My guess
is we want to keep bases in the country, maybe using Iraq as a base
for a further conflict with Iran, which the United States is pushing
toward very rapidly,” he said.
“The problem the United States
has is we’ve forgotten what sovereignty means, what international
law means.”
For My Country, My Country,
director Laura Poitras chose to focus on a Sunni doctor, Dr. Riyadh,
who was running in Iraq’s January 2005 elections, to highlight the
challenges faced by ordinary Iraqis.
Poitras, who describes the film
as a “critique of the occupation,” said she had wanted to make a
film after becoming increasingly frustrated by the level of debate
in the United States, which she says ignored Iraqis caught in the
middle.
“I wanted to understand the
situation on the ground and from the position of the people who are
in this war, and I felt that to understand it from that perspective
would shed light from all political perspectives,” she said.
“It is also a film that I think
will challenge political perspectives from both sides, because it
really is, in a sense, a celebration of democracy and at the same
time it’s a critique of the occupation.”
The fundamental clash of culture
between America and Iraq had left the United States isolated in
every sense, Poitras said, with diplomats virtually imprisoned in
their Baghdad Embassy.
“The fact is that the United
States is trying to occupy or bring democracy to this country with
very little knowledge of the country and the people, and I felt that
I couldn’t tell the story without telling that perspective.”
--Rob Woollard/AFP
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