Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, and director Javier Corcuera uses his to pander to our liberal bias, but even the director's more specious indulgences—like an off-point montage of pictures from Abu Ghraib—barely compromise what is otherwise a sophisticated documentary vision of the effects of Dubya's war on terror on the people of Iraq. Over and over again—through interviews with children maimed during the conflict, young boys who left school to support their families (one because petrol prices were too high), an ambulance driver, and a woman who lost all of her offspring in a terrible explosion—Corcuera philosophically arrives at the phantasmagoric toll of war on landscape and the human spirit. To see or not to see is the existential crisis of an occupied people, who fear the night as you or I might dread a cloaked killer and whose schoolchildren no longer draw flowers, only tanks and bombs and falling buildings. Horribly deformed after an explosion, a boy speaks of how dogs and giants appear to him in dreams—a poetic musing that chills the spine. Another opines casually while walking through the shambles of a lost paradise, "I wish we did not have oil." From the mouths of babes whose innocence has been smitten, the fallacy of the war on Iraq becomes impossible to deny.
E.G., Slant Magazine