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Control
Room
(U.S.A.)
2004 original. Director - Jehane Noujaim. Filmed by Jehane Noujaim
and Hani Salama. USA Producer - Rosel Varela. Middle East Producer
- Hani Salama. Distributor -Magnolia Pictures. (84 minutes).
Reviewed
by Ralph Berenger, TBS contributing editor
A great
documentary filmmaker is like a great journalist: both have
a nose for news, a sense of the dramatic, and the skill to tell
a compelling story so truthfully that it affects even the most
skeptical viewer. Jehane
Noujaim is a great documentary filmmaker.
Control Room is all about finding the essence of a news
story—in this case how the Arabic satellite channel Al
Jazeera covered the 2003 Iraq War. In the end, however, the
story turned into something more. This documentary is winning
plaudits around the world, and will be released in theaters
in the US as a feature film. A CD Rom, containing additional
scenes and interviews, is also planned by the director and her
distributor.
The Egyptian-born,
Harvard-educated filmmaker set up camp in Doha, Qatar, in the
spring of 2003 shortly before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Through interviews, news clips, and candid filming, Noujaim
draws the viewer into the world of global journalism, often
rough and tumble, often frenetic and dysfunctional, and sometimes
heart-shattering. The most poignant moment in the film is the
footage of Al Jazeera reporter Tareq Ayoub, who was killed shortly
after being filmed on the rooftop of the Palestine Hotel in
Baghdad April 8, 2003-the day Baghdad fell to US forces. His
death seemed to draw the once-distant American journalists closer
to their Arab brethren at Centcom.
Americans,
especially, will be transformed by Noujaim's film because Al
Jazeera has been vilified in the US by both the media and government
as "the voice of Osama bin Laden" and "the propaganda
arm" of some unidentified Arab force. Good old-fashioned
Yankee xenophobia? What Americans will see are trained professional
journalists carrying out their passionate pursuit of a story-like
American journalists once were before high salaries, university
degrees, and celebrity metamorphosed reporters into just another
group of elites covering other elites for increasingly alienated
audiences.
Granted,
Al Jazeera journalists have a point of view (mostly pro-Arab/anti-US
government policy in the Middle East on nearly every initiative)
that would make most Americans fidget in their Lazy Boys and
nervously thumb their remotes, but the honesty of this cinéma
vérité is compelling, especially when those
interviewed expressed admiration for many American virtues like
free expression, patriotism, and religious fealty.
For example,
at one point a weary Sameer Khader, the senior Al Jazeera producer,
confided to Noujaim that if he were offered a job at an American
network, "I'll take it and send my children to American
universities to exchange the Arab nightmare for the American
dream."
After
three short months inside Doha's war-fired crucible, the viewer
senses that the once-aloof American journalists and the once-defiant
Arab reporters found enough common ground to feel comfortable
with one another. The viewer is left to ponder whether Control
Room shows the Western and Oriental worlds in microcosm.
Noujaim,
who won critical success in her first documentary, Startup.Com,
about an Internet company, resists the ego trap that snares
many documentary filmmakers: she stays out of camera range,
and after a while the viewer forgets all about her. She lets
her camera show the story; she doesn't tell us the story.
Critics,
used to Hollywood-type documents, may find Control Room
unnerving and jittery. At times the sound is not as clear as
it could be, and the lighting has a film noir quality
to it. But it feels real and these lapses in production values
seem only to enhance the final product.
Interviewed
on camera were faces that will be familiar to anyone who switched
back and forth from the US channels to Al Jazeera. They include:
Lt. Josh Rushing, Centcom's press officer; Hassan Ibrahim, Al
Jazeera journalist; Deema Khatib, Al Jazeera producer; Tom Mintier,
CNN correspondent; Abdallah Schliefer, TBS's editor-in-chief,
who is also Middle East executive producer of Control Room;
and David Shuster, NBC correspondent. TBS
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