Control Room (2004)
Different channels. Different truths.
A chronicle which provides a rare window into the international perception of the Iraq War, courtesy of Al Jazeera, the Arab world's most popular news outlet. Roundly criticized by Cabinet members and Pentagon officials for reporting with a pro-Iraqi bias, and strongly condemned for frequently airing civilian causalities as well as footage of American POWs, the station has revealed (and continues to show the world) everything about the Iraq War that the Bush administration did not want it to see.
- Date of release
- 2004-01-22
- TMDB
- 7.3 / 10 (62)
- Runtime
- 1h 24m
- Genres
- Documentary, War
- Director
- Jehane Noujaim
Casting
- Samir Khader — Self - Senior Producer, Al Jazeera
- Josh Rushing — Self (as Lt. Josh Rushing)
- Hassan Ibrahim — Self - Reporter, Al Jazeera
- Abdul Jabbar Al-Kubeisi — Self - Iraqi Dissident
- Nabeel Khoury — Self - Spokesman, US State Department
- David Shuster — Self - Correspondent, MSNBC
- Tom Mintier — Self - Correspondent, CNN
- Muafak Tawfik — Self - Translator, Al Jazeera
- Omar Al-Issawi — Self - Correspondent, Al Jazeera
- Jihad Ali Ballout — Self - Media Relations, Al Jazeera
- George W. Bush — Self - US President (archive footage)
- Donald Rumsfeld — Self - US Secretary of Defense (archive footage)
Interesting facts
Control Room is a 2004 documentary film directed by Jehane Noujaim, about Al Jazeera and its relations with the US Central Command (CENTCOM), as well as the other news organizations that covered the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Production
Control Room was originally to be funded by the BBC, but Noujaim's plan of documenting Al-Jazeera covering the war was passed along to BBC director Ben Anthony, who later produced Al Jazeera Exclusive. One of the reasons Noujaim's film is titled Control Room is that Anthony got exclusive access to the newsroom, which left her to shoot elsewhere, including the control room.
Noujaim says she wanted to be at the center of news creation and make a film on the broader perceptions of the war, a reason why she headed to [Al Jazeera]'s headquarters in Doha, which was barely 15 miles away from the Central Command, the military base of the United States.
Noujaim had raised $US60,000 for the film and says she did the film "as cheaply as she could". She rented an inexpensive Pakistani hotel in Doha and called upon her cinematographer friend Hani Salama to join the project. They both carried their own cameras, Noujaim with a Sony VX2000 and Salama with a Sony PD150. Noujaim was only in the Middle East for 30 days to complete filming for Control Room.
Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.
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