Egyptian-American documentary producer Jehane Noujaim has broken box office records with Control Room, her latest documentary, writes Yasmine El-Rashidi In 1991, as the United States launched its first military attack on Iraq, CNN's ratings hit the ceiling as its news coverage was beamed to 170 million sets worldwide. A little over ten years later, as the US began its second military campaign against Iraq another network claimed the attention of the global audience -- Al- Jazeera, with 45 million viewers. As the missiles struck Iraq on 19 March 2003 the global media rushed to Baghdad, eager to position themselves close to the action. Amid the commotion, the global outcry, the increasing confusion that beset journalistic ethics one woman chose an alternate path. Twenty-nine-year-old Noujaim -- born and raised in Cairo to a Lebanese-Egyptian father, Khalil, and American mother, Beth -- was watching events unfold from the Arab media hub that is Al- Jazeera's headquarters in Doha, Qatar. From there, in the 30 days allowed by her visa, Harvard graduate Noujaim monitored how Al-Jazeera's journalists covered the Iraq war. In its first week of screenings at New York's prestigious Film Forum Control Room, the documentary Noujaim made, has broken box office records. Some critics have noted that given regional turmoil, and global discontent at the Bush administration's handling of Iraq, the film was always going to attract a large audienece. Others, though, including Salon.Com, critic David Sterritt, and the Christian Science Monitor, have foregrounded the skill with which the director tackles her subject. Noujaim's film provides an opportunity to re- examine one of the most pressing questions in international relations today -- is America radicalising or stabilising the Arab world? And in doing so it spotlights the complexities of television news making during times of war, when opinions and viewpoints are intensely held and information closely managed. In providing a balanced view of Al-Jazeera's presentation of the second Iraq war to Arab viewers around the world, Control Room calls into question many of the perspectives -- cast as realities -- offered to the world by the US media. The documentary offers viewers a place in the offices of Al- Jazeera from which to look out at the war and the world. Branded "Osama Bin-Laden's mouthpiece" by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the network has been the subject of much criticism by US administration officials. "We are dealing with people who are perfectly willing to lie to the world in order to further their case," Rumsfeld says in a clip from an address to the press about Al-Jazeera included in the documentary. During the war, and its disastrous aftermath, Al- Jazeera reporters have been repeatedly accused of bias -- the result, perhaps, of presenting to the world footage from which the rest of the world's media had shied away. At one point in the film Lieutenant Josh Rushing, a young American military spokesman, responds to Al-Jazeera's explicit depictions of those killed during the war. "The night they showed the P.O.W.'s and dead soldiers," he says, "it was powerful, because Americans won't show those kinds of images. It made me sick to my stomach." The images produced an uproar in the US and Britain, and led US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld to accuse Al-Jazeera of violating the Geneva Conventions. Control Room explores how truth is gathered, presented, and ultimately created by those who deliver it. "The idea for the film emerged from different sources," Noujaim says. "Growing up and going back and forth between Egypt and the United States provided the initial entry point. Seeing the complex difference in perspectives on the same events between the two cultures made me start thinking about news, the creation of the news, who's responsible, and then on to questions of how these two peoples are supposed to communicate if their basic perceptions of the world as provided by their news are different. "As Al-Jazeera came to prominence as a new kind of news source for the Arab world, its status seemed to intersect with many of my earlier questions around the media. Over the course of the last year, the station was roundly criticised by the US government, yet I would go home to Egypt and my father would be watching. The contradiction between its popularity with the Arab public and how hated it was by many Arab governments was fascinating. I was curious to see the people at Al- Jazeera, people who were taking basically hell from the entire world," she said. Control Room was filmed at Jazeera's Qatar headquarters and at the nearby US Central Command (Centcom) from the eve of the war until President George W Bush's 1 May, 2003 declaration that major combat was over. "It was an amazing nexus," Noujaim says. "In this tiny Persian Gulf country the size of Rhode Island all the information the world received about the war was being created. We were sitting in the middle of the desert, 700 miles away from Baghdad, thousands of miles from the Pentagon where all the decisions were happening, and yet all the news was coming out of this place." Noujaim and her co-producer, Hani Salama, followed Rushed and Al-Jazeera journalists Sameer Khader and Hassan Ibrahim throughout the six weeks of filming. "I make films about people," she says. "You look for characters who will be challenged. I wanted to find people who were really trying to understand the other side, who were complex characters" she says of her choices. "I didn't want to take a cheap shot at Fox News -- you know, it's very easy to do that. You have to follow someone you have a belief in. You have to feel that there may be something they might discover because their mind is open enough to discover it. I don't think it's interesting to follow characters you know are never going to change." "We met with Hassan and Samir in the Al- Jazeera cafeteria," Noujaim says. "They both drank a lot of coffee. I think they believed in us and what we were trying to do fairly early on. In starting any project like this you need someone on the inside who trusts you and trusts your motivations. Since we weren't funded by anybody we both felt like we were trying to understand how the news was being created at Al-Jazeera and at Centcom rather than trying to forward some agenda. I think they also recognised that we were interested in them as individuals within this system." "Both men come from very interesting backgrounds. Hassan grew up in Saudi Arabia, and attended grade school with Osama Bin-Laden, went to college in Arizona, spent a year as a 'deadhead', has friends in the CIA, has visited the palaces of Saddam Hussein," she says. "Samir was personal translator for the King of Jordan and has very surprising views on the US." One of the most interesting aspects of Control Room is the view it gives of street life in Iraq. During Bush's speech announcing that Saddam Hussein had 48 hours to leave Iraq the director shot in a cafe, focussing on the expressions on the faces of customers. Whatever their politics, noone wants his country dictated to. Control Room bridges the gap between the general and the specific: it locates itself in the midst of an ongoing clash between the Western and Arab world, and does so through the prism of satellite television's impact on how viewers receive information from news providers, and how that information is tailored to perceptions about the target audience, just as Army information officers disseminate news tailored to military objectives. "What I'm trying to figure out for myself," says Noujaim, "is why I feel I'm in a bubble when I'm in the United States? And it has to do with the fact that when you turn on the television you see a very small selection of information. Abdullah Schlieffer, one of the characters in the documentary, would say, 'well, because the US is the most powerful country in the world, there is no need to really look far outside of the United States.' Hassan [the Sudanese Jazeera journalist] says that there's this feeling that you're surrounded by a big ocean, so you're not touched by the countries around you." The behind-the-scenes feel to Control Room offers viewers a mind-opening look -- Arabs, Americans, and the world -- at what went on in this one network hub and the neighbouring US Command Center. "Personally," Noujaim says, "I came away with the feeling that the more you watch the less you know. I came away feeling that I had to look a lot deeper at everything I was watching and examine the stereotypes that I have. I hope people will come away from this film taking nothing they see on television for granted." In 1996, with a Gardiner Fellowship, Noujaim directed Mokattam , an Arabic film about a garbage- collecting village. She then joined MTV News and Documentary Division as a producer for the documentary series Unfiltered. In 2001 she produced and directed Startup.com in association with Pennebaker Hedgedus Films. The feature-length documentary won several awards. She has since worked in the Middle East and the US as a director and cinematographer on documentaries, including Born Rich (Jamie Johnson), Only the Strong Survive (Miramax Films), and Down from the Mountain (Cohen Brothers).
