Avis des critiques

It's this span of time, along with the complete, slow-burn immersion into Fahdel's extended family, that helps grant the film it's marvelous time-capsule quality, a monument to fortitude and perseverance illuminating the often unseen costs of war.

It's the best film I've seen about the disastrous US invasion and occupation of Iraq. At five-and-a-half hours long, Homeland will likely test the endurance of even the most hardcore cinephiles. Yet every second of that runtime is meaningful, with Fahdel documenting verite-style on home video his Baghdad family's fear and tension-relieving levity as they prepare for the 2003 American bombing and ground assault that unseated Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime.

It is almost unbearable to sit through, which is as it should be. "Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime," Ernest Hemingway wrote. "Homeland: Iraq Year Zero" is both an irrefutable proof of that statement and a nagging reminder that the statement is insufficient to address the ultimate tragedy of war.

The camera tends to linger on the faces it encounters, giving us the illusion that we're seeing an unvarnished portrait of a society in transition. But Fahdel largely fails to comment on the silent oppression and unspoken truths lying just beneath the surface of the seemingly idyllic, prelapsarian world depicted in the film's first half.

Homeland: Iraq Year Zero is a two-part, five and a half-hour home movie that, if seen as widely as it should be, could serve as a crucial historical corrective... While showing casual catastrophe, and using a truly heartbreaking technique of revealing with text onscreen the fates of characters that we come to know, Fahdel goes well beyond the cliché of putting a human face to war.

[Fahdel] limits himself to the composition a choral mosaic of voices, fragments of life and emphatic vignettes. Though the disaster of war is ubiquitous throughout the second part, the film avoids drawing any conclusion, political or otherwise. Even hatred and rage, not only understandable but also historically justified, find hardly any room in the film. The moral and figurative perspective of western representation... is challenged by a refusal to convey a single point of view.

Much of the conversation on the Iraq War, especially in the West, has been focused on the United States, either criticizing or applauding its actions. What both stances have in common is their privileging the American perspective. Homeland refocuses our attention on the more fundamental matter of what Iraqis have to say about themselves.

The greatest film that I saw at this year's edition of Olhar de Cinema screened on the Brazilian festival's first and last days. Homeland (Iraq Year Zero) needed full days to itself, and not simply because of its running time. As has happened to me when watching Shoah (1985)—another lengthy, interview-and-landscape-based film of great power—I felt so thoroughly immersed in the stories being told by people as they lived moment-to-moment that I could feel my sensations of time and place change.