Life and Leisure

Films about Iraq war lose battle of the box office

By Kadhem al-Attabi and Andy Goldberg (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-08-26 13:28

Films about the Iraq war are about as popular at the box office as Saddam Hussein would have been at a Kurdish wedding.

Whether dealing with the war directly, its horrific toll on the Iraqi people or the trauma that it inflicted on US servicemen and their families, not a single film of the dozens of movies made about the ongoing conflict could be called a box-office success.

In Iraq itself, the war struck a deathblow to the country's cinematic infrastructure, which had already been reeling under decades of Saddam Hussein's strict control.

Since the 2003 US-led invasion, most Iraqi theaters have been closed across the country. It was only in May that an Iraqi film, Son of Babylon - the story of a boy and his grandmother searching for his father missing since 1991 - directed by Mohamed al-Daradji, was screened in one of Baghdad's theaters.

Only a handful of films have been made since the US invasion. In 2004, Uday Rashid tried to bring Iraq's movie industry back with Underexposure, the story of a filmmaker, a poet and a wounded soldier, filmed amidst Baghdad's rubble. That was followed by Mohamed al-Daradji's Dreams in 2005. The films won international awards but were not shown in Iraqi theaters - hardly a help to the local cinemas.

"Cinema is an industry that needs financing, and government funding stopped after the occupation. I think the US-led invasion is fully responsible for what happens in the country now," actress Awatef Naeem says.

Shafiq Mahdi, a top cinema and theater expert in Iraq, was a bit more optimistic, insisting that Iraqi cinema was "not in a dark phase".

"Its light was only put out and needs someone to switch it on," he says.

Amjad Daoud, 52, says he has not taken his family to a movie theater since the mid-1980s, "when our mental state was not ready to watch movies, although the security situation was normal and we had the latest movies in theater".

"When I look at cinemas in Baghdad today, I feel sorry for their beautiful past, because their present is full of sadness after some of them (were) turned into stores and (are) full of garbage," Daoud adds.

Many would say that US cineplexes are also filled with garbage. Certainly among the blockbuster franchise films and raunchy comedies there is little place for reflection on one of the country's longest wars.

Industry experts say there is one simple reason for this: The war, now in its seventh year, is still too immediate for the average filmgoer to regard as a source of entertainment. Indeed, this unwillingness to examine the gaping injustice of the war means that the Iraq conflict barely qualifies any more even as a subject for news coverage.

"We're a reality show everybody's bored of," one US soldier quips.

That sense of ennui was barely nudged even by the Oscar success of The Hurt Locker, a nail-biting drama about a US bomb disposal expert led by a risk-happy sergeant. The film was named best picture last year but was feted more for its historic win by a first female director than its brave look into a war that most people prefer to ignore.

But at least the film made a profit, earning $16 million in the US and $32 million in the international market - all on a $15 million budget.

That's more than can be said for Green Zone, the highest profile movie to be made about the war. The film featured Matt Damon as the principled antihero in the tale of how a US officer disobeys his superiors and discovers how the political leadership lied about going to war, and then botched the job of governing Iraq. The film cost more than $100 million to make, but earned just $35 million in the US and $60 million abroad.

Most other films dealing with the Iraq war can only dream of such numbers. Movies such as Stop-Loss, Battle for Haditha, Body of Lies, In the Valley of Elah, and The Messenger all bombed at the box office despite earning positive reviews and film awards.

"The public seems to have their heads in the sand regarding this war," says film critic Stephen Farber.

"People do not want to look at it or think about it. People do not want to confront some of the harsher truths about what is going on there."

That dynamic is also a reflection of the wider trends, says Kimberley Pierce, the director of Stop-Loss.

"If you look at the box office nowadays versus in the past, people probably have more of an escapist tendency. You're seeing that week by week."

German Press Agency