Daniel Gold and Judith Helfand's Everything's Cool and Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's The Prisoner: Or, How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair will be playing as part of Thom Powers' Stranger Than Fiction series later this month at IFC. I haven't seen Everything's Cool yet, but Mark an I both got a sneak peak at The Prisoner a few weeks back and we highly recommend it. The film tells the story of Yunis Khatayer Abbas, an Iraqi journalist who has the peculiar misfortune of having been unjustly imprisoned by both Saddam Hussein and the U.S. occupying army--at Abu Ghraib, no less. An earlier (and slightly less developed) version premiered to good reviews at Toronto, but one of the soldiers mentioned in interviews with Abbas showed up at a screening in Toronto and footage with him was quickly--but effectively--added into the story. Definitely a more serious and powerful film than Tucker's last film, the flawed but unfairly maligned (in my opinion) Gunner Palace, The Prisoner is yet another really powerful documentary about the war. I realize that things look grim in Iraq and there has been plenty written and whined regarding mass media's failure to convey an accurate picture of life in the war zone, but I genuinely believe that we will one day look back on all the amazing documentaries shot in Iraq or otherwise made about the war and realize that at least American documentary filmmakers didn't drop the ball. Anyway, buy tickets and congratulate the filmmakers in person on a job well done.
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