E-Mail This Article to a Friend Taking sides? Jehane Noujaim’s Control Room BY KEVIN Y. KIM

This month, Iraq observers might mark their calendars thus: 800-plus US servicemen dead, 13 months of so-called "victory," not a single WMD found. The only thing Americans find certain is that nothing — not even Donald Rumsfeld’s resolve — seems, well, certain. Who to believe when our own president mistakes "Mission Accomplished" for "Mission Impossible" and top-tier generals tell conflicting stories of Abu Ghraib?

Into the breach, Control Room, Jehane Noujaim’s stunning documentary about the Iraq war, drops into theaters next week with the timing of a precision-guided smart bomb. And no one will mistake the filmmaker for Michael Moore’s Arab-American female half. "How can I film to make a political point when I was torn between people against the war and Iraqis for the removal of Saddam Hussein?" asks Noujaim, who filmed for six chaotic weeks leading up to Bush’s declaration last May that war was over. "I wanted people to really understand where the other side is coming from, so steps can be made to make a better world. I wanted to go where there are people at the center of debate trying to understand what’s going on. To me, that was Qatar."

Barren peninsula and oil-rich emirate, Qatar is also home to the two news outfits Noujaim shuttled between for her story: the US military’s CentCom press center and the notorious Arab news channel Al-Jazeera. For showing footage of Osama bin Laden, Iraqi civilian casualties, and dead US soldiers, Control Room has been branded Public Enemy #1 by the Bush team and conflated with the despotic Arab regimes it regularly skewers. For her part, Noujaim — who was born in Washington, D.C., raised in Cairo and Kuwait, and sent to Harvard by her Egyptian dad and Midwestern mom — points out that her film is aimed at misinformed Arabs, too. "There are misconceptions in the Arab world about the American people, as opposed to America’s government. They don’t feel the US government really tries to grasp the other side, to see them as human beings. I hope to screen my film there so they can see [CentCom press officer] Josh Rushing’s desire to understand them."

If Noujaim’s last documentary, Startup.com, was Proust-like in its close observation of two Internet entrepreneurs, Control Room is a kaleidoscopic snapshot of newsmen reacting, in real time, to world events no one completely understands. Journalists hail from every continent, but they include the same two breeds — those who get spun and those who don’t. Helping viewers keep their bearings are three characters — Rushing; Samir Khader, a genteel Al-Jazeera producer; and Hassan Ibrahim, a US-educated Al-Jazeera journalist — who discuss almost everything Americans and Arabs ever wondered about the war, the world, and one another.

Then there are the images. Al-Jazeera video of stitched faces, severed limbs, dead soldiers splayed across cold floors. Video that Noujaim included because it was at the heart of the CentCom–Al-Jazeera conflict. Khader, in New York to do press for Control Room before it rolls out nationwide, leans forward in his armchair to explain why Al-Jazeera focused on the US and Iraqi casualties. "Iraq is an Arab country. Many other Arabs live there, many Iraqis live in other countries. As an Arab country, as Arabs, what do you want us to focus on?" He stares out his hotel window. "That progress has been made since Saddam fell? Okay, there is progress, we discuss it. But the main story nowadays is a story of suffering — we have to talk about that."

Jehane Noujaim will appear at a special screening of Control Room at 7 p.m. this Monday, June 7, at the Harvard Film Archive. The film will open next Friday, June 11, at the Kendall Square and other theaters to be announced.