Voices Of Iraq

Herald rating: * * *

For six months last year, three former MTV producers, Eric Manes, Martin Kunert and Archie Drury, handed out 150 digital video cameras to people all over Iraq with the aim of allowing them "to show the world who they are and what Iraq will be".

The result, edited down from some 450 hours of footage to a lean and slick 80-minute package, takes the viewer from Fallujah during the April uprising to the marshlands in the south and Kurdish communities in the north.

The impression is one of support for the American-led invasion and has attracted some, though not much, scepticism in the British and American press.

Some of the camerawork is suspiciously professional and subjects address the unseen cameraman as "mister", a form of address one Iraqi is unlikely to use to another.

Circumstantial evidence linked the production to the US military - a company that does PR for the Army worked on publicity for the film. The military were certainly happy with the results.

Kunert addresses these points, passionately if not always coherently, in an interesting blog at www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1744 and the case against the film is far from clear.

My criticism of it at the time of the just-finished documentary film festival was unfair: the Iraqi political prisoners shown "laughing off the indignities visited on prisoners at Abu Ghraib" were actually commenting about their own torture by Saddam's henchmen. They should have been so lucky, they were saying, as to be "tortured" by Americans.

Whatever the murky questions that remain about the film's provenance, it is certainly not an unalloyed valentine to the American presence.

Subjects disagree on whether the country is better off now than under Saddam and it is plain that nobody was prepared for the aftermath of the invasion.

All said, it is mesmerising, if only for the detail that eludes foreign news crews and for its sometimes piercingly sad kids' perspectives.

It is free of direct editorialising and to characterise it is a piece of propagandist conspiracy is pretty simple-minded.

But just how well it represents the wide range of Iraqi opinion is quite another matter.

Running time: 80 minutes
Rating: M, contains violence
Screening: Academy