BAGHDAD — Iraqi director Akram Kamel is racing against the sun to finish shooting a Baghdad street scene for his television miniseries.
Daylight is the only lighting he has. When night falls, actors and crew scramble home to beat curfew and escape the criminals, kidnappers and skittish police that roam the capital's streets.
"Quiet everybody! Stand by," shouts Kamel, his eyes locked on a video-monitor framing two actors seated on a restaurant patio. The characters begin to profess their love, in whispers, when two low-flying U.S. military helicopters roar overhead, drowning out their lines. "Cut," the director barks. The actress rolls her eyes.
The scene resumes, but this time a mosque loudspeaker starts transmitting the afternoon prayers, muffling the dialogue. Minutes later, Baghdad is plunged into another power blackout. Neighborhood generators rumble to life. Kamel surrenders to the cacophony.
"This country is hopeless," he fumes, running his fingers through thinning gray hair.
Filming on Baghdad's streets unwittingly produces some form of cinema verite, and directors such as Kamel are confronting the challenges as they try to revive Iraq's battered entertainment industry.
After decades of government censorship and a two-year U.S. occupation, actors, filmmakers and television producers are embracing new artistic freedoms to tell stories about Iraqis -- before and after Saddam Hussein's overthrow -- for an increasingly housebound audience.
A dozen new private TV channels are pumping out soap operas, sitcoms, reality shows and dramas, with a distinctly Iraqi flavor. For the first time, Iraqi television is tackling issues of social injustice, government corruption and, on occasion, life under Hussein.
The nation's first postwar feature-length film is "Underexposure," which focuses on a lost generation of young artists coping with the U.S. occupation. It is now debuting at international film festivals.
"Departure," a groundbreaking television serial, which debuted in April, chronicles a gangster family that thrives after the fall of Baghdad by peddling stolen antiquities. Think "Sopranos" with an Iraqi twist. A character on the show lands in jail days before the U.S. invasion after getting drunk and insulting Hussein. It marks the first time that an Iraqi entertainment program has negatively depicted life under the dictator.
