Operation Filmmaker (2007)
Average Rating: 7.3/10
Reviews Counted: 31
Fresh: 28 | Rotten: 3
Operation Filmmaker is a darkly funny, ironic tale of a cross-cultural exchange gone wrong.
Average Rating: 7.6/10
Critic Reviews: 15
Fresh: 14 | Rotten: 1
Operation Filmmaker is a darkly funny, ironic tale of a cross-cultural exchange gone wrong.
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Average Rating: 3.7/5
User Ratings: 512
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Movie Info
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
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All Critics (33) | Top Critics (15) | Fresh (28) | Rotten (3)
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.
What might have been a vanity project emerges as a surprisingly complicated morality tale.
Everyone here comes out smelling bad -- that's why the film's so good.
This gut punch of a documentary will knock you for a loop.
An exit strategy in Iraq? This self-aware study shows how hard it'll be.
A ruefully funny cautionary tale about cross-cultural tone-deafness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's fearless filmmaking. And the surprising observations about cultural differences and insights into the movie production process make the whole thing worthwhile.
Veteran documentary filmmaker Nina Davenport parses an ill-conceived experiment in cross-cultural understanding that began with the best intentions.
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.
As the story of an exasperating, manipulative, lazy and entitled young man, it's one for the books.
Audience Reviews for Operation Filmmaker
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