Toronto and Stranger Than Fiction. Operation Filmmaker.

"Director Nina Davenport set out to document the experience of a 20-year-old Iraqi whose brief MTV appearance inspired Liev Schreiber to hire him as an intern on the Prague set of Everything is Illuminated," writes Eric Kohn at indieWIRE. "Ultimately, Operation Filmmaker is an essential study in intercultural communication and the ways that it can go so very wrong."

Operation Filmmaker has opened Toronto doc programmer Thom Powers's Stranger Than Fiction series at the IFC Center and ST VanAirsdale, the Reeler, attended last night's NYC premiere and took notes on comments from Powers and Davenport.

"Whether her subject is serious about the movie business or not, Davenport gives Muthana's plight extra resonance by cross-cutting between footage of real, blood violence in Iraq, and scenes of Muthana on the fake blood-soaked set of Doom," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "Can you blame the guy for pulling out all the stops to stay in the realm where the piles of corpses are only make-believe?"

"Operation Filmmaker, much like My Kid Could Paint That, is one of those documentaries that were conceived one way and turned out much differently than anyone intended," notes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "Davenport does a nice job rolling with the punches."

"Not since Luis Buñuel have we had such a wonderful joke on do-gooder liberalism," writes Gerald Peary in the Boston Phoenix.

Posted by dwhudson at September 26, 2007 3:31 PM