Interview. Nina Davenport.

"Sometimes, if you're a documentary filmmaker, you can search years looking for the right subject, Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "At other times the subject will walk right up to your camera, which is pretty much what happened with Operation Filmmaker, an absorbing story about the best intentions gone terribly and comically awry."

"Thanks to a steaming pile of liberal-minded good will, Muthana Mohmed, a 25-year-old aspiring filmmaker was brought from Baghdad to the Czech Republic to intern on the set of an American movie production," explains Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "[T]he makings for an inspiring true tale of determination, hope, and cross-cultural healing were all in place. Yet as charted in Nina Davenport's provocative, utterly compelling documentary Operation Filmmaker, Muthana's journey after leaving his homeland for the first time in his life was undone by factors reflective of an unbridgeable cultural divide."

Steve Erickson talks with Davenport about her "very long, slow and painful process of disillusionment."

Updated through 6/6.

For the Voice's J Hoberman, the film "is as much virus as video documentary.... The question that courses throughout Operation Filmmaker is: Whose needs trump whose?"

As David Edelstein puts it in New York, this "stupendous documentary" is "the story of a grand American liberal-humanitarian gesture gone kerflooey."

"That director Nina Davenport chooses to resolve the story on a pat, inappropriately jokey note is thus maybe a fitting way to end a story of conflict between the self-oblivious and a master manipulator, but it's still a disappointment," writes Karina Longworth in the SpoutBlog.

But for Louis Proyect, "At the conclusion of Nina Davenport's excellent documentary, you don't know who is more disgusting–the military men who have ruined Iraq or the film executives who have turned Muhtana into a psychologically and economically dependent tragicomic figure."

"Operation Filmmaker occasionally verges on damning its subject - one of the most gripping characters seen this year on film - for being a cagey, arrogant, single-minded narcissist, but hey, that's showbiz," writes Bill Weber in Slant.

"Davenport and Schreiber clearly envisioned Mohmed's journey as a neat, tidy little human-interest story," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "Instead they got something infinitely messier and more vital: a human story and one that says a great deal about the world we live in, filmmaking and the limitations of good intentions."

IndieWIRE interviews Davenport, too.

Updates, 6/5: "Davenport fortunately doesn't make it too explicit that her film can or should be read as an analogy for the Iraq War," writes Chris Barsanti at Filmcritic.com. "The mere sight of Mohmed set adrift in a foreign land by benignly thoughtless well-wishers makes that argument dramatically enough."

"Ms Davenport's neatly shot film truly becomes its own making-of meta-chronicle when Muthana issues demands that confront assumptions about the ethics of documentary and performance," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "By the time Muthana has made his way to London to try film school, her open monetary support and voiced desire for a happy ending challenge our distinctions between Operation Filmmaker and a funded fictional production."

Updates, 6/6: "Much like My Kid Could Paint That, which followed the too-cute-to-be-true story of a precocious four-year-old artist through exploitation and possible fraud, Operation Filmmaker takes a thrilling left turn from its original conceit, and Davenport does a nice job rolling with the punches," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"[A]ll this probing for truth, of whether Muthana is con artist or lost soul or both, is disingenuous," argues Lauren Wissot at the House Next Door. Davenport is "like a lover who won't take no for an answer and her need for closure - to finish the film! - is every bit as creepy and disturbing as her subject's ploys. Muthana may be always waiting for someone to save him but so is Davenport. She's waiting for an exit strategy instead of creating her own by walking away."

Posted by dwhudson at June 4, 2008 5:04 AM