Control Room
Directed by Jehane Noujaim
83 minutes
Distributed in Australia by Rialto Entertainment
REVIEWED BY VANNESSA HEARMAN
Control Room is a moving account of life inside the Qatar-based Aljazeera satellite television station, during the lead up to the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It focuses on three key characters: Sameer Khadar, a news producer for the station; Hassan Ibrahim, reporting for Aljazeera from the US Central Command makeshift headquarters in Kuwait City; and Lieutenant Josh Rushing, a member the US Army media team.
Control Room moves at a frenetic, breathtaking pace. Directed by Egyptian-born, US filmmaker Jehane Noujaim, the film examines the notion of media objectivity and exposes the hypocrisy of the US news media which trumpets "objectivity" but uncritically disseminates that propaganda line of White House and the Pentagon.
Aljazeera was founded in 1996 and in eight years and with a budget of around $42 million a year, boasts 40 million viewers of its Arabic broadcasts. Branded the "mouthpiece of Osama bin Laden" by US President George Bush and disliked by nearly every Middle Eastern government, Aljazeera's popularity soared during the invasion of Iraq and began to make ripples across the media of the Coalition of the Willing.
In November, Melbourne ABC Radio host Jon Faine praised Aljazeera's unprecedented access to the Arab world and argued that "the US media could learn from Aljazeera" to close the "credibility gap" when reporting the ongoing war in Iraq.
Control Room shows the many criticisms levelled at Aljazeera and the attacks against its journalists, such as the murder of Tareq Ayyoub, when missiles were fired at Aljazeera's Baghdad offices.
The network was accused by US war secretary Donald Rumsfeld as having contravened the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war when it broadcast pictures of US soldiers captured by the Iraqi Army. The film then shows us images of maimed and dead Iraqi children, destroyed houses — precisely the sort of coverage of the war that won a wide audience for Aljazeera.
The reporters of Aljazeera continue to wrestle each day with notions of objectivity. A foreign media trainer advises an Aljazeera journalist that he ought to keep objectivity in mind, while the journalist argues back that, as an Arab, it was difficult to not be angry and moved by what was happening in Iraq.
Control Room shows that objectivity at the expense of humanity is not possible.
The film also charts the evolution of the seemingly unflappable Rushing into a man who was prepared to take on board some of the views of his Arab colleagues at CentCom. In discussions with Hassan Ibrahim, Rushing learns to appreciate the sensibilities of the Arabic-speaking audience of Aljazeera and how a resistance movement could crop up in Iraq against the US-led "liberation".
Rushing concedes that images of destruction from Iraq would galvanise resistance to the US and its allies around the world, just as he was made to feel angry and disgusted by images of dead and injured US soldiers broadcast in the Arabic media.
Control Room takes us into Aljazeera and CentCom in those critical moments of the invasion of Iraq, like the bombing and occupation of Baghdad by the US military and the toppling of the Saddam Hussein's statue. It provides us with a view from within Aljazeera and the Middle East that was largely unavailable to non-Arabic speaking audiences during these events.
The film underscores the importance of reporting the truth in times of war. Not always easy watching, but it is a film that packs a punch.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, August 18, 2004.
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