Laura Poitras
Award Winning Film Director
Previously Aired On: March 20, 2007 - Listen to this Show!
Laura Poitras received a Peabody Award for her last documentary, Flag Wars, (2003). Flag Wars received numerous other awards. and had its U.S. television premiere on PBS’s P.O.V. documentary series and was nominated for both a 2004 Independent Spirit Award and a 2004 Emmy Award.
Laura’s past work includes Oh Say Can You See… ? (2003), and Exact Fantasy (1995). She studied filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute and the New School. Before making films, she worked as a chef. She currently resides in New York City.
Laura’s film My Country, My Country was an Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature this year. My Country, My Country creates an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Iraqis living under US occupation. Her principal focus is Dr. Riyadh, an Iraqi medical doctor, father of six and Sunni political candidate. An outspoken critic of the occupation, he is equally passionate about the need to establish democracy in Iraq, arguing that Sunni participation in the January 2005 elections is essential. Yet all around him, Dr. Riyadh sees only chaos, as his waiting room fills each day with patients suffering the physical and mental effects of ever-increasing violence.
Dramatically interwoven into the personal journey of Dr. Riyadh is the landscape of the US military occupation, with Australian private security contractors, American journalists and the UN officials who orchestrate the elections. Unfolding like a narrative drama, My Country, My Country follows the agonizing predicament and gradual descent of one man caught in the tragic contradictions of the US occupation of Iraq and its project to spread democracy in the Middle East.
