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Back to Iraq

By Ken Nielsen (Reviewer)

Nice Bombs
Directed by Usama Alshaibi
(Artvamp and Benzfilm Group, 2006)
www.nicebombs.com

Usama Alshaibi is an American. Alshaibi traveled to Iraq in 2003, but he is not a soldier. Alshaibi is a recently naturalized US citizen from Iraq, and he lives in Chicago. It is through this unique background that the film Nice Bombs is able to present the viewer with an original and personal account of Iraq.

After he spent his first ten years growing up in Iraq, Alshaibi's mother smuggled her family out of Iraq, during the Iraq-Iran war in the seventies, to Jordan and finally to the United States. In 2003, Alshaibi returned to Iraq to make peace with the past and to understand the present. With support from his employer, Studs Terkel (with whom Alshaibi worked as a sound engineer for ten years, producing over 7,000 hours of recordings), Alshaibi and his wife, with a digital video recorder, made the long trip to Jordan to reconnect with his father. From Jordan, they traveled to Baghdad to revisit his birthplace and reconnect with relatives.

Nice Bombs is essentially a personal journey back to Iraq, but it is also a time capsule of a period in history that depicts the hope of a country recently released from the stranglehold of over twenty years of dictatorship. At the time of Alshaibi's visit in 2003, US soldiers were still largely considered liberators by the Iraqi people and were not yet the targets of mass frustration resulting from failed and ill-conceived policy.

Predominantly filmed in Baghdad, Alshaibi's Nice Bombs provides a perspective into the lives of Iraqis living under war and occupation in the Middle Eastern metropolis. Often surprising, the film filled me with the overwhelming desire to figure a way out of the mess that arrogant Americans have created. However, by the end of the documentary, even Alshaibi's previously hopeful uncle (a main figure throughout the film), when interviewed via telephone in 2006, has serious doubts about Iraq's future and sadly fears that the only way to end the violence is to reinstate another dictator.