Homeland: Iraq Year Zero

The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was extensively covered from the American perspective in contemporary news broadcasts and subsequent documentaries, but filmmaker Abbas Fahdel here offers a remarkable five-hours-plus view from the perspective of ordinary Iraqis. Fahdel, long a resident of France, decided to visit relatives in Baghdad early in 2002, when tensions following 9/11 were reaching a peak. In the first half of Homeland he records his brother, sister-in-law, and their three children as they attempt to live normal lives under the threat of war and a barrage of patriotic propaganda lauding Saddam Hussein. Fahdel also shows the family visiting a memorial to the victims of an earlier aerial attack, foretelling a tragedy that the family will suffer—a revelation that hangs over the rest of the film like a ticking time bomb. In the second half, Fahdel documents the family's life under American occupation. People in the streets now speak more openly of the brutality of Saddam's rule, but they also complain bitterly about the lack of security and the insulting fashion in which they are often treated by U.S. soldiers. Only at the close is the family's loss fully covered, and it comes to represent in microcosm the suffering endured by the entire population. Homeland: Iraq Year Zero is a quietly devastating portrait of the toll that war takes on those who are often considered mere collateral damage. Extras include a New York Film Festival Q&A with Fahdel. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)