Control Room

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * * * )

Peering behind the scenes at the Arabic-language television network Al Jazeera, the Arab world's eyes during the invasion of Iraq, this is a documentary full of sobering and illuminating moments. But what is most striking is the difference between the staffers (mostly veterans of the now-closed local BBC office, they bring a sophisticated intelligence to bear on events) and their American counterparts (who look, when they think, like fat men getting out of a bath).

Network bimbos do anodyne nightly pieces-to-camera, encouraging viewers to believe they are in a war zone when they are actually 1000km from Baghdad in the Doha, Qatar, offices of CentCom, the Army's spin-doctors.

As they file soundbites of official spin as though they were in-depth analyses, the skeleton staff at Al Jazeera wrestle with questions about truth and impartiality. It's enough to make you feel pretty gloomy about the Land of the Free.

Noujaim, Egyptian-born and Harvard-educated, was a protege of the prolific and brilliant documentary-makers D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus on films like Only the Strong Survive (about ageing soul stars) and startup.com (co-director) and here, striking out on her own, she has made an engrossing and fascinating study of a specific time and place which is rich in wider ramifications about journalistic dishonesty and military madness.

The film was made in the weeks following the United States-led invasion of Iraq, and the passage of time has lent many sequences very bitter irony: Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld says of Al Jazeera that "we are dealing with people who are willing to lie to the world to make their case"; and George Bush says when the first US soldiers are captured, "I expect POWs to be treated humanely, just as we are treating the prisoners we have captured humanely."

Control Room has plenty of sombre moments, too. Chillingly, we see on CentCom monitors what was happening just out of frame when cameras took those fabled shots of joyous liberated Iraqis topping Saddam's statue.

Like all the best documentarians, Noujaim understands that non-fiction films need great characters - and she's found them here.

The most engaging is the burly Sudanese-born reporter Hassan Ibrahim, inured against terminal cynicism. When Rumsfeld condemns Al Jazeera's interviews with POWs as a violation of the Geneva Convention, Ibrahim bursts out laughing: "What about Guantanamo Bay? So now there's a Geneva Convention?"

And producer Samir Khader rips into a staffer for securing an interview with an American analyst who condemns US policy: "That wasn't analysis," he roars. "That was hallucination."

What's most impressive about Control Room is that it doesn't settle for simple heroes and villains. It unsettles your certainties. Its makers understand, like Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell, that the truth is rarely pure and never simple.

* Last weekend, US-backed authorities in Iraq extended indefinitely a ban on Al Jazeera and closed its Baghdad office.

DIRECTOR: Jehane Noujaim

RUNNING TIME: 83 mins

RATING: M (war footage)

SCREENING: Rialto from Thursday