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What is so astounding, disorienting, and engaging about the
documentary Laura Poitras has made becomes clear by contrast to the absurd and even
shocking lack of any serious reportage in the United States about the American war in
Iraq. U.S. reporters are strategically "embedded" (held so close to U.S.
military leadership nothing can escape the omnipresent military censor’s eye). U.S.
"news" is collected, processed and distributed over corporate-owned mass media
networks (half infotainment, half bald propaganda, and always serving corporate owner
interests). My Country, My Country breaks the spell thus cast by examining real
people in Iraq, as they are forced to cope on a daily basis with painful, insane,
impossibly irreconcilable dynamics, all caused directly or indirectly by the American
occupation.
Poitras went to Iraq where she worked for eight months alone, filming
and interviewing everyday Iraqis living under American occupation. Making the happenstance
acquaintance of Dr. Riyadh while she was seeking interviews at Abu Ghraib prison, much of
the final documentary ended up focusing on Dr. Riyadh and his family during the momentous
period leading up to and following the historical nation-wide elections in 2005. Dr.
Riyadh, a medical doctor and father of six, also was a Sunni political candidate. By the
time of the elections, his party had withdrawn its name from the voting list, a dynamic
explored to illustrate the complex and difficult politics of bringing democracy to Iraq,
the inanity of doing so by American military force, and the profoundly devastating toll
all of this has been taking and continues to take on many good, capable, well-intended
people like Dr. Riyadh. Iraq is a place where the best of intentions are rendered
meaningless on a daily basis.
As Riyadh’s political aspiration and dreams of democracy for his
country tatter, Poitras captures him at work, his office flooded each day with patients
experiencing increasing war wounds and psychological ravages, as the violence grows
greater and more chaotic. Such everyday reportage stands in stark contrast to the
mind-numbing bland generics of body counts and incident reports on American media.
Interspliced are scenes of the American occupation, staffed by what prove to be huge
numbers of paid mercenaries, exposing the lie of the outsourced occupation to
"private contractors," along with embarrassingly candid scenes of UN officials
struggling to do the right thing and put an international face on the U.S. orchestrated
voting process. What clearly emerges are two wars which have seemingly nothing to do with
each other--the American "spin," the American preoccupation with making things
look right to play well back home in the U.S., has seemingly nothing whatsoever to do with
the nightmare of the insurgency happening on the ground. Often the chaos seems to be
caused by American aggression, a covert war against Iraqis.
Poitras lets her interviewees speak for themselves, and editorializes
primarily by constructing her film. As the eye-witness evidence compounds, it becomes
difficulty not to see the U.S. as engaging in the same old nineteenth-century practices,
with the U.S. cavalry shooting up the redskins (or brown skins in this case). It begins,
ever so stomach-churningly, to look like a racist genocide in the making. This film
represents journalism at its finest, as has not been practiced in the U.S. in some time.
Because it is a series of dispatches from the front, literally, the world still too much
in the midst of it, it is impossible to draw broader perspective observations about My
Country, My Country. It is important that the film has been made. It is important
that its message get out into the world at large.
- Les Wright
