I Love the Smell of Celluloid in the MorningWhy are all the Iraq movies really movies about making movies?

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Likewise in Davenport's fascinating documentary, the audience shares the view of the person behind the camera as she watches her movie and its consequences spin out of control. Operation Filmmaker follows a Shiite film student from Iraq, Muthana Mohmed, as he begins an internship on the Prague set of Everything Is Illuminated, the screen adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel, at the prompting of director Liev Schreiber. This gesture of goodwill backfires, however, when Mohmed proves to be a clumsily manipulative prima donna and, increasingly, just a nasty piece of work, alienating his benefactors time and again. As a result, though Operation Filmmaker has all the ingredients of a heartwarming real-life tale, it turns into a fretful, self-doubting record of best intentions gone awry. "You don't give a shit about Iraqis," Mohmed says to Davenport. Her only motivation in making the film, he adds, is to "show how good you are as an American." Davenport's implicit response is that the good-Americanism that led to the making of Operation Filmmaker is a microcosm of the hopeless naivete that led the United States into Iraq in 2003.

"I'm the exact person to be a filmmaker because my life is a movie," Mohmed says. To be precise, his life is Davenport's movie, and he does all he can to undermine her project: He verbally abuses her, hounds her for money and visa assistance, and even steals her tape and film equipment. Yet she follows him everywhere, the camera forever trained upon her star as he meanders from a P.A. job on Doom to a film-school stint in London. (Lucky Mohmed finds a patron in the Rock.) "I'm going to keep filming until something good happens," says Davenport, desperately in search of the happy ending that Mohmed, like an intransigent screenwriter, refuses to give her. Her dogged persistence and his pathological behavior create a feedback loop, blurring the line between auteur and subject: The "Filmmaker" of the title could refer to either of them.

Operation Filmmaker might be seen as a cautionary tale about the belief that cinema has the power to change lives for the better. It's a belief that De Palma and Broomfield have evidently held on to. "My hope with Battle for Haditha is to open up the eyes, minds and hearts of the world and to bring empathy to all of the people affected by this war," Broomfield states in the film's press notes. De Palma goes even further—he wants films like Redacted to help "end this war." (Whatever that means.) Noted film critic Bill O'Reilly envisions a different kind of political efficacy for Redacted: "Every jihadist in the world will be able to see it," he warned on The O'Reilly Factor. "And this could lead to the deaths of Americans. There's cause and effect for all of this stuff."

Well, no. The most disturbing aspect of these movies is that the masters of cause-and-effect agitprop are not laurelled directors like De Palma and Broomfield but the insurgents portrayed in Battle for Haditha, with their rudimentary videos and cheap equipment. Their ghastly snuff movies are not individual cries of conscience; rather, they are highly practical tools of motivation. The films by the Western pros will change nothing, except perhaps the lives of those involved in making them. The most trenchant moment in Redacted is when De Palma appears to acknowledge the ultimate futility of this film that he so clearly felt he had to make, using one of the soldiers as his mouthpiece: "People watch, and they do nothing, or they make a video for people to watch, and they do nothing." The soldier who speaks these words is Angel, the filmmaker.

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