Iraq War Films May Invade Oscar Ballots

NEW YORK, Jan. 20, 2007 — -- It's a time of great expectations in Hollywood: Fresh off the Golden Globe awards last Monday, actors, actresses, directors and producers are now biting their nails over Academy Awards nominations, which will be announced Tuesday.

Amid the glitz and glitter, one Oscar category, Best Documentary, doesn't usually get that much buzz. But this year, of the 15 films that could be nominated, four are about the war in Iraq.

Each of the four films differ in point of view, and each of the directors show Iraq -- so often on the television screens of Americans -- differently than other countries at war.

The films show scenes like a raging battle in Fallujah as seen from a camera strapped to a soldier's gun, a look inside a Shiite militia on a rampage and quiet moments of a family helpless as their country explodes around them.

"I don't know of any other subject matter that has inspired so much documentary filmmaking," says Daniel Frankel, an associate editor at Variety.

Iraq has been a magnet for documentary filmmakers who wanted to delve deeper than the stories they were seeing in the daily news coverage.

"I said, 'Okay, I need to make a documentary because I felt that this kind of story-telling wasn't going to get told in mainstream news,'" says Laura Poitras, director of "My Country, My Country."

Poitras' film follows a Sunni cleric named Dr. Riyadh over eight months as he ran for a seat on the Baghdad provincial council during the Iraq elections in January 2005.

She lived in Iraq during that time, shot 260 hours of footage by herself, and carried one bag -- a very small bag, at that.

"When I was on the street, I didn't want to be seen as a camera person, obviously, because that made me a target," she says. "So I needed something that I could conceal very, very quickly and then take out."

Following Dr. Riyadh, Poitras was granted access that few others had. She could sit for hours in a Sunni doctor's office and listen to the conversations of regular Iraqis lives and struggles.