Written by Linda
January 02, 2009
There was so much hissing in the theater during the packed festival screening of Control Room, you'd think the building had sprung a toxic gas leak or something. Instead, the annoying and relentlessly occuring sound was the audience hissing their disapproval of the "characters" on the screen, just as they would at, oh, say a film screening at a certain liberal arts college I attended. But, c'mon people! This captive audience was viewing a documentary about the Arab Al-Jazeera news network, and the station's coverage of the then-just-starting Iraq war. Let's just safely assume that, since we all paid good money to see said documentary, that we all probably agree that George W. Bush is a horse's ass and leave it at that. Shut your hissing yaps and see what the film has to say!
As it is, Control Room, is a very-timely documentary by Startup.com director Jehane Noujaim, who very wisely went behind the scenes of a major news network right when Dubya's Iraq war was beginning in early 2003. But this network wasn't CNN or Fox News; it was Al-Jazeera, the rather new (founded in 1996) Arab news channel that seemingly came from nowhere to find an audience of some 50 million in the Middle East. Dismissed by Dubya's cronies for broadcasting stories full of lies and propaganda, Control Room presents instead a largely Western-educated journalistic staff who wants to report the story as they see it: through Arab eyes.
Camped out in the official U.S. Army Central Command press headquarters, it is fascinating to see reporters of all nationalities crammed in a huge press room in Qatar (not even Iraq!), sucking up what little scraps of information the U.S. officials decide to release. In all actuality, like people all over the world, these journalists are also watching the war on TV and are hungry for ANY information. When a general officially shares the infamous deck of cards bearing Iraq's Most Wanted, the resulting fury of the press for not having access to the deck is truly a moment of comic cacophony.
Several central characters emerge in the film. There is Hassam Ibrahim, an Al-Jazeera journalist who used to work for the BBC, and has extremely strong opinions of disbelief about the whole situation. There is Sameer Khader, a senior producer for the network, who admits he'd like to send his kids to college in the U.S., to "trade the Arab nightmare for the American dream." But perhaps most interesting, there is Lt. Josh Rushing, a U.S. officer who serves as a liason between the foreign press and the U.S. military. Rushing is more than willing to sit down for heated personal debates with the journalists, and you can actually see him grow to understand the different sides of the situation at hand. He candidly admits at one point that when he saw images of dead Iraqis, that they didn't affect him emotionally as hard as pictures of dead American troops. The realization, he admits, alarmed him.
Though much of Control Room is fascinating, it feels like one small chapter in a much larger story. It ends with the occupation of Baghdad, and the toppling of Saddam's statue in the city square (a moment that shocks the Arab journalists, while the Americans applaud and hoot at the TV screens). Much of the footage in the documentary seemed lucky, while there were other times where you'd wish the camera would turn around and go to another room where you just KNOW something else more interesting is going on. Despite these feelings that Control Room seems somewhat thrown-together, I still think that the film has a lot to say. If only for opening the debate and viewer's eyes to a different international perspective of the U.S. media, Control Room should be seen.
