The Blood of My Brother

Reviewer: Walt Opie
Rating (out of 5): ***½

One over-riding question that arises while watching Andrew Berends' 2005 Iraq-set documentary The Blood of My Brother is, how did an American filmmaker get access to all of this, short of joining Sayid Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army himself? Several reviewers have already commented that much of the footage here puts Western media coverage to shame, and it certainly does. We see inside a mosque during prayer time with hundreds of men lined up shoulder to shoulder; we watch Shia insurgents get charged up and then battle an American tank and an Apache helicopter (feeling oddly mundane compared to scenes from Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down); and we view badly wounded civilians inside an Iraqi hospital, including young children and elderly men. It seems clear that Berends has a viewpoint he wants to get across, although his goal appears to be more humanitarian than political.

The film offers us a candid glimpse of one Baghdad family's struggles to keep it together after their number one son and provider, Ra'ad, was shot dead in April of 2004 by American military forces while guarding a mosque in the Kadhimiya section of Baghdad (site of a tragic stampede in '05). The main character here is 19-year-old Ibrahim, Ra'ad's younger brother, who clearly looked up to his older sibling and now feels adrift. In fact, everyone in the community refers to Ra'ad as a martyred hero, while they seem to eye Ibrahim with a bit of skepticism—he will never measure up to his dead brother who started his own tiny photography studio and died a martyr at the hands of the current occupying forces.

There are some difficult images here--of course some might say every "comfortable American" (of voting age) should be required to sit through them--including several corpses, the up close and personal slaughter of a sheep who "knows what's good for him," and a shocking street scene in Najaf that changes from a high energy peace march to a blood-curdling shootout in one jarring burst of machine gun fire. There are also scenes with U.S. troops going on raids inside Iraqi civilian homes, riding in tanks through the streets of Baghdad, and at an open market where they confiscate weapons for sale and ransack the stall ("Tear this whole place up," one of the soldiers yells.)

Overall, the film does not provide a completely coherent narrative—we never really find out what happens to Ibrahim and his family (the deleted scenes help fill in some details)—but perhaps that's the real message here. After all, Iraq is still very much a work in progress, the outcome of which remains unclear.