Homeland: Iraq Year Zero

In February 2002 Abbas Fahdel travels from France back to Iraq and turns the camera on his family, his friends and his twelve year old nephew Haidar. War is expected; daily life is taken up with preparing for shortages of food, water and power. The director resumes filming two weeks after the invasion. This time the streets are full of foreign soldiers, part of the city has been closed to ordinary people, and ordinary life has come to a stop. The five and a half hour documentary is in two parts and contains not a single scene of combat; what it is about is not the war itself but the people trying to live around it. The title of the three hundred and thirty four minute production says as much.