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.

'My Country, My Country'

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.

"I was able to get things that I knew nobody else was going to be bale to get," Poitras recalls.

Poitras was also able to portray the utter powerlessness of Iraqi families, whose country is being torn apart all around them. In one scene, Dr. Riyadh's wife is trying to swat a fly as gunfire breaks out just outside the window. It is violence portrayed as something ordinary.

'The War Tapes' and 'The Ground Truth'

Technology is allowing this crop of film makers to document the war in way their predecessors could not. For Vietnam and World War II, directors often relied on film archives and news footage. Now, with the smaller cameras and digital equipment, they can film and edit all by themselves.

Deborah Scranton, director of "The War Tapes," took advantage of technology for her film, using it in a new, bold way. She gave lightweight cameras to 10 soldiers from a New Hampshire regiment, and the film shows footage that three of them brought back.

In one scene, a full-scale gun battle in Fallujah is shown. It was filmed from a camera attached to a soldier's gun.

Filmmaker Patricia Foulkrod has never been to Iraq. Instead, she made a film about the effects of war on the American soldiers who return. "The Ground Truth" is comprised of interviews of injured soldiers in military hospitals.

Foulkrod realized she would need to probe deeply to get to the core of what American soldiers were feeling when they returned from Iraq. She eventually asked them about killing. She says what she saw in their eyes was "an inexplicable feeling of heartbreak and loss and loneliness."

'Iraq In Fragments'

The power of documentaries is they can take the time to see history develop. James Longley, the director of "Iraq in Fragments" spent two years in Iraq.

"I can see people grow up. I can see seasons change," he says. "[I can] see people's opinions change, see the situations around them change. It's a completely different kind of work than the daily news."

Longley spent months building up the trust of the Mahdi Army, the militia of the radical Shiite Cleric Moqtada al Sadr, who allowed him to get shockingly close to Sadr and his fighters. During his filming, there was obvious danger.

"I am willing to assume a certain amount of risk to get the story," Longley says. "I don't really want to get killed. I am not trying to get killed. I am not going out of my way to endanger myself or the people that I am filming."

It may be no surprise that Iraq is now a dominant subject for films, because commentators say films are a reflection of our culture.

Says Longley, "Given that the United States has been occupying Iraq for almost four years with over 100,000 troops, it is surprising to me that there aren't more documentaries."

ABC News' Elizabeth Stuart contributed to this report.