Kuwait Bans Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11": August 3, 2004
"The Saudi Arabian royal family have blasted Michael Moore for his controversial documentary, 'Fahrenheit 9/11', calling it 'insulting' while the government in neighbouring Kuwait has banned the film. [...] The state-owned Kuwait National Cinema Company had applied for a licence to show 'Fahrenheit 9/11', but its request was turned down by government censors. However, it is currently being shown in other Middle Eastern countries, including the United Arab Emirates and the Lebanon."
[MediaBulletin]
Combining critical dialogue, conceptual analysis, and a montage of multimedia, After9/11 anticipates many of the recent revelations about the darker side of the war against terror, and, in a reflective postscript, provides a positive vision for moving America beyond 9/11. [...] the hour-long film tracks the emergence of an Age of InfoTerror, from the terrorist attack of September 2001 to the information war leading up to the Iraq War. Two opposing voices guide the viewer through a richly visual and openly critical appraisal of the current political landscape. The first is a selection of national security speeches by President Bush, which provide a chronology for the evolution of a US government policy after 911. The second voice is novelist and Brown professor, Robert Coover, who uses a powerful dream narration to frame a montage of the technologies of war, media, and surveillance that have overtaken more human concerns."
"War Feels Like War" is the story of an international group of journalists who refused to be "embedded." Motivated by the desire to get the 'real' story, the unilaterals ventured onto the battlefield without military protection and frequently without guides. They often found themselves reporting the stories that went uncovered in the wake of the triumphal columns of soldiers and embeds: civilian deaths, injuries, chaos in the streets, and a more mixed reception for the invaders than appeared in first reports. [...] Along the way, "War Feels Like War" gives riveting vérité portraits of the journalists themselves, whose conflicting feelings of attraction and repulsion to combat mirror the ambivalence of their audiences over modern-day "war as spectacle." The journalists are alternately cynical about human motives and seduced by the romanticism of being war correspondents. Thoughts of self-importance are punctured by the grim realities of war. Their daring is in constant tension with the impulse for self-preservation. 'This is the story of journalists caught up in a new era in war-reporting, says director and cameraman Esteban Uyarra, 'and of a media world now divided in two camps — 'embeds' and 'unilaterals' — and what that means for how we see and feel about war.'"
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