Operation Filmmaker

I don't think there's ever been a better metaphor for the US war in Iraq than the documentary Operation Filmmaker.

Filmmaker Nina Davenport says on the film website

David Schisgall, a friend from college, had directed a piece for MTV about young people living in Iraq, focusing mainly on American soldiers. "True Life: I'm Living in Iraq" also featured seven minutes about a young Iraqi film student, Muthana Mohmed, who was desperate to go to Hollywood. After the show aired, the actor and director Liev Schreiber contacted David. Liev wanted to give Muthana an opportunity to come to the West, and he thought Muthana's journey might also make for an interesting documentary. David thought I would be the ideal filmmaker to document this story, so I was hired.

But that only sets up the story. No one, not Schreiber, not Schisgall, and not Davenport, think through what it means to invite an Iraqi student to be an intern.

We see almost immediately that both the filmmaker and Mohmed are unreliable in the literary sense--Davenport has no boundaries and Mohmed either intentionally lies to manipulate people or, if I am being generous, doesn't know what his truth really is. At first, this is annoying. I wanted Davenport to say no to Mohmed, even once, but over and over again she gives in to her documentary subject. In this, she herself becomes a subject of her documentary.

Davenport had also given cameras to some of Mohmed's friends in Iraq, and layers their footage of the war with news reports and her footage of Mohmed, so we can see a glimpse of the lives of Iraqis, not from an American perspective but from an Iraqi perspective.

Themes of immigration, power, media ethics, personal responsibility become the backdrop to the struggle between filmmaker and subject, between the subject and other Americans he meets who all project onto Mohmed their ideas of what an Iraqi person experienced and believes.

And just in case you don't get the metaphor Davenport is portraying in her documentary, the end title card before the credits declares:

I wanted a happy ending.




Now I'm just looking for an exit strategy.

We couldn't get ourselves to exit the theater. Ushers had to ask several groups of moviegoers to leave.

And if you don't believe me, you can read the comments of some people more qualified than I to give their opinion: film students and their teacher who also gets paid to review films.