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Press Reviews:"[Davenport's] tenacity is one of the best things about Operation Filmmaker" "A-" rating "You won't know whether to laugh or cry. I did both." "Tense and transfixing!" "Davenport's direction is intricate and her editing is sublime." "Wickedly ironic!" "Sad, funny, obsessively watchable!" "Droll, entertaining ... Not since Luis Buñuel have we had such a wonderful joke on do-gooder liberalism." "An entertaining if uncomfortable reminder that good intentions don't always work out, that a documentary filmmaker is unavoidably part of his or her film, and that objectivity is wishful thinking." "Nina Davenport's unapologetically cunning doc exceeds the sum of its parts to become almost unimagineably allegorical and even an indictment of its own shock-and-awe premise. And the damn thing is funny, too — disconcertingly so." "Meaty issues of media responsibility and individual self-determination, coupled with inside-baseball aspects of set politics and immigration policies, elevate this unintentional analogy on U.S. involvement in Iraq to a hot-button level that will compel fests and distribs to have a look. ... Pic raises pithy questions sure to provoke animated discussions pro and con. Credit Davenport for a mostly unbiased presentation that presents her own disenchantment in a balanced manner. Her intuitive camerawork leads a tidy tech package." "As director Nina Davenport involves herself in her subject's cross-cultural growing pains and intrigues, her provocative film becomes just as much an unfolding anatomy of fiction-making as it is a shifting portrait and a fraught adventure in liberal guilt." "It's a chaotic situation and an appropriately chaotic film, filled with Davenport's anxious asides to the camera. But no one is more invested in Muthana than she, and he knows it." "Provocative, utterly compelling....[this] brilliantly matter-of-fact film is testament to the seductions and limitations of film itself." "Gripping ... it only gets better in a can't-look-away-at-the-scene-of-an-accident sort of way." "Why won't these ungrateful Iraqis be nice?" "While no documentary can claim absolute objectivity, this one offers an especially keen examination of how that ideal inevitably falls short. If some viewers have seen this as a failure, as Davenport's loss of distance, as Muthana's 'unlikable' self-presentation, the film's representation of their twisting and turning relationship is, for all its complexities and displeasures, fascinating and revealing." "Davenport is a good enough filmmaker to balance that out with the hint that she is exploiting him just as much as he tries to exploit her." "Fascinating, bleakly funny" "Maddeningly Funny!" "Ruefully funny..." "Provocative, utterly compelling ... [this] brilliantly matter-of-fact film is testament to the seductions and limitations of film itself." "A complex meditation on the psychological manifestations of cultural conflict, power, victimization and war." "...Encapsulates the entire situation between America and Iraq..." "Fantastically engaging!" "Gripping ... it only gets better in a can't-look-away-at-the-scene-of-an-accident sort of way." "...A bitter metaphor for the U.S.'s failed 'humanitarian' project in the country." "While Operation Filmmaker, directed by Nina Davenport, makes direct visual reference to Iraq only through TV screens, the movie functions as an apt metaphor for the perceptual abyss that separates the domestic spin on the war and people living it on the ground." Operation Filmmaker: An interview with Nina Davenport Women With Vision Interviews Nina Davenport About "Operation Filmmaker" "Unnervingly comic." "A compelling watch, deeply sad and blackly comic in its narrative developments." "an incredibly quirky, interesting film" **** 4 stars " An excellent, educated documentary. 4 out of 5" "Both funny and suspenseful, as well as the only Iraq doc I've seen - and damn near the only liberal doc on any subject - in which the filmmaker implicates herself as part of the condescension and bad faith of American foreign policy." "Starts out optimistically, and then veers into intense tragedy..." "Can you blame the guy for pulling out all the stops to stay in the realm where the piles of corpses are only make-believe?" "A searing indictment of colonialism in Iraq" "Please, just boot the kid in the ass and walk away."
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