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UK film at Cannes says terror fears exaggerated
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May 14, 3:01 AM (ET)
By Erik Kirschbaum
CANNES, France (Reuters) - A British documentary arguing U.S. neo-conservatives have exaggerated the terror threat is set to rock the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, the way "Fahrenheit 9/11" stirred emotions here a year ago.
"The Power of Nightmares" re-injected politics into the festival that seemed eager to steer clear of controversy this year after American Michael Moore won top honors in 2004 for his film deriding President Bush's response to terror.
At a screening late on Friday ahead of its gala on Saturday, "The Power of Nightmares" by filmmaker and senior BBC producer Adam Curtis kept an audience of journalists and film buyers glued to their seats and taking notes for a full 2-1/2 hours.
The film, a non-competition entry, argues that the fear of terrorism has come to pervade politics in the United States and Britain even though much of that angst is based on carefully nurtured illusions.
It says Bush and U.S. neo-conservatives, as well as British Prime Minister Tony Blair, are exaggerating the terror threat in a manner similar to the way earlier generations of leaders inflated the danger of communism and the Soviet Union.
It also draws especially controversial symmetries between the history of the U.S. movement that led to the neo-cons and the roots of the ideas that led to radical Islamism -- two conservative movements that have shaped geopolitics since 1945.
Curtis's film portrays neo-cons Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld as counterparts to Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri in the two respective movements.
"During the Cold War conservatives exaggerated the threat of the Soviet Union," the narrator says. "In reality it was collapsing from within. Now they're doing the same with Islamic extremists because it fits the American vision of an epic battle."
ILLUSORY FEAR OF TERROR
In his film, Curtis argues that Bush and Blair have used what he says is the largely illusory fear of terror and hidden webs of organized evil following the September 11, 2001, attacks to reinforce their authority and rally their nations.
In Bush's government, those underlings who put forth the darkest scenarios of the phantom threat have the most influence, says Curtis, who also devotes segments of his film to criticize unquestioning media and zealous security agencies.
He says al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has a far less powerful organization than feared. But he is careful to avoid suggestions that terror attacks won't happen again. Included are experts who dismiss fears of a "dirty bomb" as exaggerated.
"It was an attempt at historical explanation for September 11," Curtis said, describing his film in the Guardian newspaper recently. "Up to this point, nobody had done a proper history of the ideas and groups that have created our modern world."
But Curtis said there were worlds of difference between his film and Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," which won the "Golden Palm" and gave the festival a charged political atmosphere that prompted this year's return to a more conservative program.
"Moore is a political agitprop filmmaker," he said. "I am not. You'd be hard pushed to tell my politics from watching it."
"The Power of Nightmares" was a three-part documentary aired in Britain and won a British film and television industry award (Bafta) this year.
insein said:http://reuters.myway.com/article/20...4_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-ARTS-CANNES-SECURITY-DC.html
I guess its smart business. Rich Liberals around the world will shell out money to support this crap. So this dude will make a ton. Like Fatass did.
George Bush and Tony Blair will whoop for joy. A strongly pro-war film has been premiered at the Cannes film festival - and it comes from Iraq. The main part of Hiner Saleem's Kilomètre Zéro, premiered in competition for the Palme D'Or, is set in 1988 against the backdrop of the deaths of thousands of Iraqi Kurds at the hands of Saddam's cousin, "Chemical" Ali Hassan al-Majid.
It is framed by scenes of the main characters, now exiled in France, rejoicing at the fall of Baghdad in 2003.
"I am against war of any kind," Saleem said. "But we didn't have the luxury to say, 'For the time being, we will be exterminated'. "If you say that the US is an imperialist country, then you are right. Had Sweden, Liechtenstein, France, come, it would have been wonderful. But they gave the US free rein; I am extremely pleased."
The scene of jubilation in the final moments of the film was "still valid. I would like to say I am optimistic, he said.
"The problem with Iraq is that it was not born of the will of a single people, but because Churchill wanted it. Power went to the people who had the most Kalashnikovs."
The story is set during the Iran-Iraq war. Ako, an Iraqi Kurd, goes out one morning in his pyjamas to buy bread. He is arrested by the Iraqi military and sent to fight on the dusty, brutal Iranian front in Basra.
One day he is ordered to accompany the body of a dead soldier as it is returned to the family. So he and an Iraqi Arab driver set off together across the unremitting landscape.
The film, partly funded by the Kurdistan regional government and partly from France, reads as a strong political statement of Kurdish identity.
Some also see it as anti-Arab, accusing it of presenting the driver as dimwitted and dominated by naive religious feeling.
Saleem responded: "The Arabs don't know the Kurds well. They forced us to study Arab history and culture. But they know nothing of our history, culture, sensibilities, dreams. An effort must be made by them to understand us."
He denied that the film was overtly political in its message: "You don't produce a film to draw people's attention to politics. I wanted to show the hills of Kurdistan, the faces of the people. I don't think I have produced a military or political film.
"It is not an ideological film. It doesn't say we are the most wonderful people on earth ... but I am thrilled people will be able to discover, to drive through Kurdistan for an hour and a half in this film."
Sami Shorashi, the Kurdistan regional government's culture minister, said: "This is a major step forward for the Kurdish people ... I see it as a work of art that well portrays the misfortune of the Kurdish people caused by the regime of Saddam Hussein."
Saleem, who has lived in France since the early 1980s and whose previous work includes Vodka Lemon, said the film was based on real events that happened to his brother.
The making of the film, he said, presented enormous practical difficulties. Because of the lack of indigenous film culture ("except for a few propaganda films"), technicians, crew and equipment had to be brought from France.
"It was a nightmare to get the cameras and crew to Kurdistan and even harder to get them back. We seriously thought of contacting the smugglers on the borders to help."
