Operation Filmmaker (2007)

90% of critics liked it
(31 reviews)
75% of users liked it
(451 ratings)

Touched by the plight of an aspiring Iraqi filmmaker whose dreams of working in Hollywood seemed to fall with Baghdad, American filmmaker Liev Schreiber invites the ambitious wannabe director to intern on Everything Is Illuminated, to unexpected results. In 2004, just one year after the United… More Touched by the plight of an aspiring Iraqi filmmaker whose dreams of working in Hollywood seemed to fall with Baghdad, American filmmaker Liev Schreiber invites the ambitious wannabe director to intern on Everything Is Illuminated, to unexpected results. In 2004, just one year after the United States launched a devastating attack on Baghdad, MTV ran a story about a 25-year-old Iraqi film student named Muthana Mohmed, who remained determined not to let the strife that consumed his country consume his dreams as well. At the time, American actor Schreiber was preparing to make his directorial debut with the film Everything Is Illuminated. After seeing the documentary on television, Schreiber was consumed by guilt for having so many amazing opportunities in the film industry and determined to give Mohmed the chance of a lifetime by inviting him to join the production of Everything Is Illuminated in the Czech Republic. Common wisdom dictates that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions," however, and as Mohmed attempted to balance the complications of living away from home for the first time with the cultural issues that arise while working with an all-American film crew, the situation quickly began to deteriorate. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Rating, Runtime: Unrated, 1 hr. 32 min.
Directed By: Nina Davenport
Genres: Documentary, Television, Special Interest

In Theaters: Jun 4, 2008 Wide
On DVD: Dec 16, 2008
Studio: Icarus Films

Critic Reviews

Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter
What might have been a vanity project emerges as a surprisingly complicated morality tale.
Ty Burr, Boston Globe
Everyone here comes out smelling bad -- that's why the film's so good.
Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
This gut punch of a documentary will knock you for a loop.
Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
An exit strategy in Iraq? This self-aware study shows how hard it'll be.
Lou Lumenick, New York Post
A ruefully funny cautionary tale about cross-cultural tone-deafness.
Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News
You can bet Nina Davenport didn't set out to make a documentary as bracingly honest as the one she ended up with.
Rob Nelson, Film Comment Magazine
Nina Davenport's unapologetically cunning doc exceeds the sum of its parts to become almost unmanageably allegorical and even an indictment of its own shock-and-awe premise.
Jennifer Merin, About.com
Particularly fascinating is the way in which it this documentary examines the filmmaker's relationship to the film's subject, and the role documentary filmmakers play in shaping their subjects' futures.
Mark Rahner, Seattle Times
If learning about other cultures shows that we're all basically alike, Operation Filmmaker is a reminder that foreign countries have their own share of nitwits, too.
Bill White, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The antagonism between filmmaker and subject reminds us that reality is never a passive still life, but a volatile entity with its own ideas on how it is to be represented.
Sean Means, Salt Lake Tribune
Davenport focuses deep on the Hollywood do-gooder mentality and her own complicity in treating Mohmed as a symbol of the war and not as a flawed person.
Jeff Vice, Deseret News, Salt Lake City
It's fearless filmmaking. And the surprising observations about cultural differences and insights into the movie production process make the whole thing worthwhile.
Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide's Movie Guide
Veteran documentary filmmaker Nina Davenport parses an ill-conceived experiment in cross-cultural understanding that began with the best intentions.
Scott Tobias, AV Club
The whole film could be seen a metaphor for America's misadventures in Iraq: Schreiber and company came in expecting flowers and sweets from a grateful native, and wound up in a quagmire.
Mark Keizer, Boxoffice Magazine
As the story of an exasperating, manipulative, lazy and entitled young man, it's one for the books.