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Control
Room: The Preview
By TBS editors
During the Iraqi War (TBS 10) and its aftermath (TBS 11), TBS
surveyed media under the rubric "Media
on Media". "Media on Media" archived examples
of how the print media reported on (primarily transnational)
television coverage of the war, whether from the Arab, American,
or British perspective.
This section
could have been titled Media on Media on Media, for it consists
of an interview with Jehane Noujaim, award-winning documentary
film director, about her latest film Control Room, which
has been sweeping film festivals and garnering extraordinary
critical comment since its launch last January to a standing
ovation at The Sundance Film Festival. The section also contains
five minutes of rolling video from the film.
Control
Room, to borrow from and elaborate on The Times (London)
summary, is a study of the Arabic TV news station Al Jazeera
as it covers the March 2003 war in Iraq from Centcom-the US
military headquarters in Qatar-while at the same time dealing
with its own correspondents in Iraq (one of whom will end up
dead before the film is over) as well as downloading feeds from
Washington DC, all via the channel's control room. There is
also interaction between Noujaim and the CNN and NBC correspondents
covering the war from Centcom. And to add to the mirror within
mirror within mirror effect, one of TBS's own senior editors
served as Middle East executive producer for the film and appears
briefly at Centcom.
The Daily
Telegraph described Control Room as "brilliant…compelling
to watch" and the New York Times wrote that it "proves
that cinéma vérité is alive and well and
perhaps more potent and necessary than ever…you are likely
to emerge from Control Room touched, exhilarated and
a little off balance, with your certainties scrambled and your
assumptions shaken."
Documentary
filmmaker Vikram Jayanti, writing in The Independent listed
Control Room as number four in his ranking of the ten
best documentaries in recent years and described it as "one
of the bravest documentaries ever made…Every American and
many Brits should watch it; a transformative work of political
art, like The Battle of Algiers, that changes how you see the
world forever." TBS's own review
by Ralph Berenger appears elsewhere in this issue.
On May
21, Control Room will have its commercial premiere in
New York at the Film Forum, prior to a wider national release.
TBS
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