15 Best Documentaries Of 2020
5. Once Upon A Time In Iraq
By now, every political commentator and journalist has spouted their two cents on the Iraq war. Whatever your viewpoint on the morality of the conflict, someone in the west has scrawled a thinkpiece. This BBC five part series took the brilliant decision to eschew the usual gobs for hire and speak to the people who were actually there, many of them Iraqis.
The documentary takes the viewer from the war’s sudden start to its drawn out conclusion, and the legacy of unrest in the region ever since. The contributors director James Bluemel finds are often extraordinary, from an Iraqi comedian who satirised Saddam at great personal risk, to an incredibly bright translator who was later forced to flee the country.
Later we meet a man chased out of Iraq by Hussein’s regime who was later part of the task force who located the deposed dictator, an event he recounts with glee. There are young women for whom war is just a childhood memory, and older women who recall the deaths of their sons with simmering rage.
It’s impossible to tell the whole story of such a complex war in just five episodes, but this series does a remarkable job of unearthing different voices to explain their side of things.