Iraq

Johnson Beharry keen to return to Iraq

TV Gossip

5 Feb 2011

Lance Corporal Johnson Beharry is keen to return to Iraq to get "closure". The 'Dancing On Ice' star - who was awarded the Victoria Cross in 2005 after driving his fellow troops to safety, despite sustaining horrific brain injuries - revealed he…

Ewan McGregor honours bomb disposal expert in Iraq

8 Oct 2007

Scottish actor Ewan McGregor travelled to Iraq to present the only female bomb disposal expert working in the country with her Pride of Britain Award. Staff Sgt Michelle Cunningham was put forward for the award by the army after singlehandedly…

The search for truth: Paul Laverty on Route Irish

The screenwriter discusss his latest Ken Loach-directed project, an Iraq-based drama

2 Mar 2011

Waterboarding. A barbaric act of intolerable cruelty that should have stayed in the middle ages or a justifiable military tool in extricating information from the sworn enemy? Given what we now know of western forces’ sometimes inhumane tactics in Iraq…

The Not Dead

1 Nov 2007

DOCUMENTARY Channel 4, Mon 12 Nov, 9pm There’s always a danger that with the constant barrage of rolling news coverage, dramas and documentaries that we may become immune to the horrors of the world, particularly the terror of warfare. But while…

Betrayed

14 May 2010

There’s little that’s cut and dried about the Iraq war, and current attempts to explain and attribute blame for its follies – Paul Greengrass’ movie Green Zone for example – often choose to overlook the stickier parts of the mess. George Packer’s…

Taking Chance

1 Feb 2010

(PG) 78min (HBO) There’s something to be said about a movie which doesn’t take the knee-jerk sensationalist route to making its point. And with a sensitive subject, such as the war in Iraq, you can see why Taking Chance would opt not to ramp up the…

Reel Iraq

14 May 2009

The point of Charlie Brooker’s excellent Newswipe series, which ended recently, seemed to be that, far from being an honest and agenda-free information source, the news is just as much a constructed text as, say, a novel or a film. And for most people…

Gregory Burke: Hoors

30 Apr 2009

Gregory Burke feels more mellow, more at home with himself than the thirtysomething who entered the public domain with the premiere of Gagarin Way in 2001. At that time there was a sense of a man dazzled by the sudden attention the play brought him.

War and Conflict

Theatre of war

31 Jul 2008

There’s always a profit to be made from war. The black market proved lucrative during World War II for the sale of rationed chocolate, coffee and cigarettes, while oil companies such as Halliburton have been kept ticking over nicely by the recent…

Dirt

Sensitive inquiry into what it means to be an outsider

31 Jul 2008

From the United States comes Dirt, a contemplative monologue that addresses racism. Originally written in German, Dirt tells the story of a 30-year-old Iraqi man who is grateful to live (albeit illegally) in an English-speaking city. Selling roses on…

Peter Oborne

22 Jul 2008

Is the strife in Iraq a conflict that can ever end? At the start of 2006, Peter Oborne was unequivocal. ‘The invasion of Iraq is the greatest foreign policy disaster since Munich,’ he said at the start of his damning Dispatches documentary Iraq: the…

Standard Operating Procedure

17 Jul 2008

Legendary American documentarian Errol Morris’ films fall into two catagories, political and wacky, and it was with the former that he won an Academy Award in 2003 for his astonishingly candid portrait of Vietnam-era US Secretary of Defense Robert…

Angelina Jolie's $1m Iraq donation

Celebrity Gossip

26 Jun 2008

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are donating $1 million to help children caught up in the Iraq conflict. The couple have pledged the generous amount through their Jolie-Pitt Foundation which will be shared by four organisations, who work to provide…

Standard Operating Procedure

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Errol Morris, USA) 116min The great documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War) turns his investigative eye towards the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. The coup of the film is that Morris interviews some of the soldiers who…

Peter Kosminksy

5 Jun 2008

DOCUMENTARY/DRAMA SEASON More4, Sat 14–Sun 20 Jun In the era of Play for Today, the rabblerousing TV dramatist lurked in every nook and cranny of the BBC, cropping up on primetime slots to frighten the horses. Now though, the nation’s broadcasting…

Stop-Loss - An interview with Kimberly Peirce

24 Apr 2008

Two films in ten years is a meagre output by any filmmaking standard. But then American writer-director Kimberly Peirce’s striking 1999 debut, Boy’s Don’t Cry, won an Oscar, and her belated follow-up, Stop-Loss, might be the first film about Iraq to…

Stop-Loss

24 Apr 2008

DRAMA/WAR (15) 111min ‘Stop-Loss’ is the rule that stops American soldiers leaving a conflict even after they have completed their tour of duty. This fate befalls Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe), a former star college footballer, whose return from Iraq…

Black Watch

10 Apr 2008

WORLD TOUR Rothes Hall, Glenrothes, until Sat 5 Apr, then touring While many Scots disagree with the continuing troop presence in Iraq, there remains an undeniable sense of pride in and anxiety for our troops overseas, and it’s this sense of a shared…

Black Watch - John Tiffany

27 Mar 2008

Certainly the most phenomenal success produced by the Scottish theatre for a couple of decades, Greg Burke’s Black Watch has travelled the world since its first appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006. New York, Sydney, Los Angeles – it has become…

Redacted

13 Mar 2008

WAR/HORROR (15) 90min Could the war in Iraq be the first conflict to be lost, not at home or abroad, but on the internet? That’s the proposition featured in Brian De Palma’s Redacted, a disturbing account of how the war on terror has been ‘You…

Battle for Haditha

28 Feb 2008

WAR DRAMA (15) 96min Scottish documentary-maker Kevin Macdonald found when tackling Middle Eastern politics, as he did so memorably with One Day in September, that no matter how even-handed your approach, there’s little chance of pleasing any of the…

The Racket

16 Aug 2007

Richard Walker’s one-man, two character, show begins with Simon, a war correspondent, sharing his views on war and the suffering he has seen in Baghdad. No amount of Scotch can make up for the never-ending ‘racket’. The second half looks at free spirit…

The Mark Of Cain

Channel 4, Thu 5 Apr, 9pm

27 Mar 2007

WAR DRAMA As the full weight of the war in Iraq continues to bear down on us, the related dramas and documentaries will just keep on coming. After Peter Kosminky’s The Government Inspector and Michael Winterbottom’s Road to Gauntanamo, here comes…

Iraq In Fragments

13 Mar 2007

Photographed, edited and directed by the American filmmaker James Longley over a two year period following the US invasion of Iraq in April 2003, this haunting documentary doesn’t take the familiar perspective of the occupying forces. Instead it goes…