Operation Filmmaker movie reviews
Overview
Director:
Nina Davenport
Writer:
Nina Davenport (writer)
Genre:
Documentary
Plot:
Soon after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, a young and charismatic film student, Muthana Mohmed
Sometimes, if you’re a documentary filmmaker, you can search years looking for the right subject. At other times the subject will walk right up to your camera, which is pretty much what happened with “Operation Filmmaker,” an absorbing story about the best intentions gone terribly and comically awry.
It’s 2004 when the film within multiple films begins, and student Muthana Mohmed is taking an MTV crew down the war ravaged streets of Baghdad in search of his film school, which has been reduced to rubble. When actor turned filmmaker Liev Schreiber catches the segment on TV, he gets a notion to find and recruit this earnest young man to intern on the Czech movie set where Schreiber is currently directing Everything is Illuminated.
On reflection, the warning signs that this internship would be a bad fit were all there in plain sight. Mohmed was a quarter-century old and yet still a student living at home where he was waited on hand and foot. He considered George W. Bush a hero for liberating Iraq (the sight of film industry liberals flummoxed by facing a pro-Bush Iraqi is in itself practically reason alone to see the film).
The only certain response is “Oy.” Operation Filmmaker doesn’t quite shake out as a microcosm of the American-Iraq relationship, although Davenport cheekily toys with the conceit. But the movie is endlessly resonant. Davenport sends Muthana’s friends in Iraq a camera and their footage is chilling.
Mohmed’s manipulative lethargy and apparent sociopathy hardly help, but his stubborn refusal to fit the mold of grateful refugee is also weirdly admirable, and Davenport never lets us lose sight of its probable traumatic roots.
Focus On The Filmmaker
While covering the character of Mohmed and the twists and turns of his fate, Davenport also focuses on several interesting issues. In broad terms, Davenport directs our attention towards what happens when well-intended but naive Americans venture to solve a political or cultural problem about which they know very little. Schreiber’s impulse to rescue Mohmed exemplifies many such sympathy-driven do-gooder undertakings.
Synopsis: In the wake of “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” American actor Liev Schreiber had an idealistic notion: to rescue an Iraqi film student from the rubble of his country and bring him to the West to intern on a Hollywood movie (Everything Is Illuminated). It promised to be a heartwarming tale, a small… In the wake of “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” American actor Liev Schreiber had an idealistic notion: to rescue an Iraqi film student from the rubble of his country and bring him to the West to intern on a Hollywood movie (Everything Is Illuminated). It promised to be a heartwarming tale, a small victory out of the troubled mission of the U.S. war in Iraq. But as in the war itself, “good” intentions yielded unintended consequences, and even this operation doesn’t go according to plan.
