Getting pretty tired of these conservatives taking cheap shots at Michael Moore every time they review a documentary. It's as if they're obsessed with the guy ever since he exposed their lies. In this film, however, Longley wanted to get up close and personal, and the cinema verite approach he chose lends itself perfectly to putting the viewer in the lives of his subjects. In the first segment, Longley follows the depressingly hopeless existence of young Mohammed Haithem, an 11-year-old boy living in the heart of old Baghdad. Mohammed's father has disappeared, he lives with his grandmother, and seesaws between struggling to get an education, where he is four years behind and struggling to learn to write his name, and working as a shop apprentice to help support his family.
Longley's lens captures Mohammed's gloomy neighborhood with dismal clarity -- the poverty, the frustration of the Sunni population at the sudden rise in power of the majority Shia, long repressed by Saddam Hussein's Baathist government, who are gaining power and control for the first time in years and making it difficult for the Sunnis to find work. Somber men play backgammon and talk bitterly about the United States only wanting Iraqi oil. "We don't care about the oil," one man says. "Why don't they just take it and leave us alone?" Rent it, buy it, watch it. It's worthy.
Longley's lens captures Mohammed's gloomy neighborhood with dismal clarity -- the poverty, the frustration of the Sunni population at the sudden rise in power of the majority Shia, long repressed by Saddam Hussein's Baathist government, who are gaining power and control for the first time in years and making it difficult for the Sunnis to find work. Somber men play backgammon and talk bitterly about the United States only wanting Iraqi oil. "We don't care about the oil," one man says. "Why don't they just take it and leave us alone?" Rent it, buy it, watch it. It's worthy.