Have you seen "Voices of Iraq"?

I just watched it this morning. It was a great window into some of the feelings in Iraq. I was suprised it contained so much recent footage, Aug-Sept 2004.

anyone else?

the movie site:
http://www.voicesofiraq.com/about_film.cfm?id=1

sounds interesting

Booya Studios produced it, they sent 150 cams to Iraq, and had the people film themselves talking about Saddam, the changes since he fell, their feelings about America. It doesn't seem to be slanted one way or the other, but ?. I expected more of them to be upset with us...I don't know the producers backgrounds or views yet, I'm off to Google them ..... :-)

BTW - I got the cd thru Netflix, was just released, apparently it wasn't in theatres?... I'll find out ..

UPDATE - ok, these reviews I basically agree with..

"If Voices of Iraq cannot claim to represent the political 'truth' about the war, it certainly provides an unprecedented glimpse into the texture of daily life there."
--Dana Stevens – New York Times

"It's impossible to say if what the makers of this 'experimental documentary' have assembled is a representative sample of these home movies, but on balance it's vastly more flattering to the Bush administration than Fahrenheit 9/11 and its ilk."
-- Lou Lumenick, NEW YORK POST

"The lack of more than a handful of Iraqis decrying their personal losses and the chaos that has ensued makes it hard to trust the sincerity of the filmmakers."
-- Jack Mathews, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

I'm glad I saw it, it widened my views...but editing is everything.

I hope it is informative.

...but I've seen it on the bittorrent networks.

which I have excerpted here:
***************************
But those scenes, which left a predictable set of first impressions,
fairly quickly gave way to a more obviously unbalanced and overtly
propagandistic presentation which became incrementally more disturbing
as the movie progressed (chronologically from April 2004 to September
2004.) Gone were many of the shaky hand held scenes replaced by much
more sophisticated amateur or professional camera work - often with two
or three cameras simultaneously shooting the same scene. This seemed a
clear indication that the 150 cameras were not distributed randomly -
but with a clear intention on somebody's part to present a message.
Also gone was the focus on the more rustic aspects of Iraq - replaced by
very sophisticated interviews with affluent and articulate English
speaking Iraqis with a message clearly arranged to put affluent American
viewers at ease. Predictably these affluent Iraqis devoted their time
to recounting how bad things were under Saddam and how much better and
freer things were now.

Gone also was the pretense that the Iraqis would be speaking strictly
for themselves: the subtitles - which included translations from the
various Arabic and Kurdish dialects also included titles and headers
which not only set the stage as to which month we were supposedly
viewing but also became a vehicle for a subtext narrative of the history
of abuses by Saddam's regime going back to 1988 and before. This theme
became the central theme of the movie and was never abandoned for more
than a few minutes after it was first introduced. The chaotic, but
exciting and "real" quality that began the film had now been replaced by
a fairly slickly edited message coming from a fairly narrow, obviously
pro-Western culture Iraqi elite - complete with young college age men
and women dressed very affluently and acting oh so chic, older men and
women with cultured accents in fairly opulent surroundings, saying very
pro-western and conciliatory messages praising the invasion and
condemning Saddam's brutality. One especially cute scene showed a
birthday party in which the 5-6 year old kids sang "Happy Birthday" - in
English! (As one of my friends commented, she had come to see the film
with some hesitation about how she would deal with the pain and
suffering - only to find she was watching Walt Disney!)

So it was becoming clear that we were not seeing a true cross section of
Iraqi peoples views nor a totally "spontaneous" filming. But the next
step was more jarring and intrusive. We began to be shown, included
among the contemporary video shots, more and more clips of old news
shots documenting the abuse of power by the Baathist regime circa 1988.
I found this a particularly blatant violation of the basic premise of
the movie: We were no longer seeing Iraq in real time but as a captive
audience being forced to witness historical footage that was blatantly
manipulative in its presentation: Old video archives of some of the
worst and most visually offensive atrocities of Saddam and his family:
torture, executions, beheadings, and the victims of poison gas attacks
- all hammered at the audience over and over again with subtitles
blaming every act on Saddam . (The irony was not lost on me that all
this was happening at that time, with the tacit approval of the then
emissary of the senior President Bush - Donald Rumsfeld!)

To understand more fully the real focus of this documentary - one needs
to look at who is sponsoring and promoting this movie. To say that this
film is about and by the Iraqi people is misleading; it is by and about
the Iraq-American Freedom Alliance whose web site describes itself as:
"a coalition of American and Iraqi organizations and individuals
committed to fostering goodwill between our nations' citizens and
winning the war on terror." It later adds that is does this "by giving
voice to those who are grateful for their newfound freedom and working
to secure democracy in their country." (As some of my peace activist
friends point out there is no place in the organization or the film for
those who are not "grateful" for the US led invasion and there are no
anti-occupation groups listed anywhere in the coalition.) This
one-sided view is further played out in the movie by the way the
well-heeled IAFA spokespeople speak with disdain of those who are
fighting the occupation with rocket grenades and car bombs - portraying
them as non-Iraqis ("Jordanians, Syrians, Iranians, Al Quaida" - but no
Iraqi would do these things") - and the movie producers clearly go
along with this ploy by presenting especially ominous news clips of
masked insurgents setting up high explosive booby traps seen through the
eyes of "night vision" camera footage (again obviously not taken by the
cameras the film producers themselves passed out, but carefully selected
from stock footage for their maximum propagandistic impact .) These are
the only views we get of any people motivated to oppose the American
occupation.
**********************
I'm not going to post the link, because it leads to the archives of a mailing list, which contains a lot of people's personal e-mail addresses.

However, this sounds like government propaganda.

thank LL, I should have been suspicious. It would be virtually impossible for an American crew to interview 'insurgents'. We have cherry-picked Iraqis telling a cherry-picked message :thumbsdown:

a Marine who was in Fallujah (in California now, due to return to Iraq in January). And he says he's glad to be there to protect his fellow soldiers. As for the Iraqi people, he says the soldiers can't tell the friendlies from the insurgents. So, everyone is on their guard. The usual response is a gesture which is the Iraqi version of giving someone the finger. You put your thumb under your front teeth with a flicking motion toward the other person. That's the response the soldiers have had from Iraqi men, women, and children.
Was that included in the movie?