Greetings from Iraq
Lessons of Darkness
A documentary about the war and postwar experiences of Iraqi children and their families, Greetings from Iraq takes viewers on a journey through a diverse and broken Baghdad. The work features three families from varying religious and economic backgrounds who recount their memories of the war and are shown dealing with difficulties imposed by the embargo. Included is a Chaldean-Christian priest who introduces the malnourished children in his congregation and explains how they are the direct victims of the economic chaos caused by the sanctions. As it documents the public health crisis, the video offers a picture of the Iraqi people as neither war culprits nor victims.
Shortly after the Gulf War, filmmaker Werner Herzog teamed up with cameraman and coproducer Paul Berriff to document the postwar devastation inside Kuwait. The result is a Dantean view of apocalyptic spectacle: lakes and deltas of thick black oil; burning wells sending towers of flame skyward and superheating everything around them. The film is organized into thirteen "chapters," narrated by Herzog in an appropriately hushed and awestruck voice and set to music by Mahler, Wagner, and Verdi. Lessons of Darkness was chosen as the best film of 1995 by J. Hoberman of The Village Voice, who proclaimed that the film "could have been made to illustrate the Book of Revelations."