Mike Shiley’s IRAQ: THE UNTOLD STORIES shows just that. This self-proclaimed non-journalist, Shiley reports on things that the professional journalists working in Iraq wouldn’t, or couldn’t, discover. He’s a genial host, talking directly to the camera between three-minute clips of the footage he shot, expanding on his experiences in Iraq, experiences that range from the profound to the absurd.
There are a few things that have been brought up in other films, the occupying force that can’t even say “hello” or “thank you” in Arabic, the infrastructure that has rendered Baghdad, once a thriving modern city and still the world’s second biggest producer of oil, into a place of power outages and 13-hour waits in gasoline lines. Harassment operations by the Americans designed to show the army’s strength that, instead and predictably to everyone except the powers that be, radicalize the Iraqi population.
It’s the fresh material, though, and the fresh approach that makes this documentary not just engaging, not just informative, but riveting. The army, for example, the source of all evil or of all good in some other treatments, comes across here as being as good or as bad as the people that make it up. Shiley makes a point of showing the bad things about Army policy, but he makes just as big a point of showing that there are caring souls worried about how the local population are surviving day to day and doing what they can to help. At the Anaconda Army base, he discovers that the dump is full of equipment, some of it still factory-packed. A 60-second dumpster dive results in boots, beef, cookies, and toilet paper. The explanation for what it’s doing there is only slightly less shocking that what can happen to the kids who make a living scavenging there. Shiley definitely has issues with the occupation, but the case he makes is all the more effective for showing all sides of that issue.
Then there are Iraqis who appear, also talking directly to the camer. There are the ones who don’t hate the United States, albeit who are losing patience at being occupied. And there are the ones that cater to the new social openness, raking in cash selling pornography or assault weapons. They’re contrasted with the ones who make $10 a day clearing land mines leftover from the war, or the Iraqi soldiers who are issued plastic helmets and flak jackets that can’t stop bullets.
Shiley uses graphic images, because that’s part of the story of contemporary Iraq. The most disturbing aren’t the ones, in full color, of body parts littering a street after a suicide bombing, or bodies riddled with bullets. It’s the image, taken with infra-red, of two ghostly figures running back and forth across the screen. One tosses a rifle away and runs away, the voices of American soldiers discuss whether or not to shoot them, the phrase is “smoke them” and the salient question that Shiley poses is why these figures, who have thrown away a rife, need to die.
He also removes the sense of separation between the audience and the Iraqis on screen with shots of a memorial erected to the victims of a so-called bunker buster. The markers for each person who died there, the clock that gives the exact time that the bomb struck, it’s a haunting parallel to a similar monument in Oklahoma City erected to similarly innocent victims. In a few seconds of screen time, the “otherness” of people living a world away, literally and figuratively, evaporates, the way bodies did when the bomb struck, leaving only outlines on the floors and walls of the bunker.
IRAQ: THE UNTOLD STORIES shows the situation in that country for what it is, a mess with the United State’s lack of an exit strategy the least of the problems. Worse is that there is no coherent plan for occupying a country that was glad to see its dictator removed from power. This is a film that will not just inflame opinion, it will also make its viewers weep for the folly of humankind.
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