• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • About
  • Donate

The Arts Fuse

Boston's Online Arts Magazine: Dance, Film, Literature, Music, Theater, and more

  • Podcasts
  • Coming Attractions
  • Reviews
  • Short Fuses
  • Interviews
  • Commentary
  • The Arts
    • Performing Arts
      • Dance
      • Music
      • Theater
    • Other
      • Books
      • Film
      • Food
      • Television
      • Visual Arts
You are here: Home / Featured / Film Review: “Nowhere to Hide” — A Potent Documentary about the Never-ending War in Iraq

Film Review: “Nowhere to Hide” — A Potent Documentary about the Never-ending War in Iraq

December 6, 2017 Leave a Comment

How palpable is the combat in Nowhere to Hide!

A scene from "Nowhere to Hide."
A scene from “Nowhere to Hide.”

By Gerald Peary

I surmise that Nori Sharif, who is the Iraqi hero-protagonist of the potent documentary, Nowhere to Hide, at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston through December 16, is a Sunni, but he never says so. This warm, kind young man is apolitical in the best, humane sense, someone who mourns everyone and everything that has been destroyed in the never-ending war in Iraq. “Only God knows what is behind this big game,” he declares several times, evoking Allah, but also he speaks like a scion of Bertolt Brecht: “Wars are planned by the elite, the dumb die in it, the opportunists benefit from it. “

In 2012, when this film begins, Sharif is in a celebratory mood. The Americans have left Iraq and, even with a Shia government, peace seems possible. He’s a happy family man with a wife and four kids and a modest home; and he revels in his work as a male nurse in the local hospital in his town of Jawalwa. What he’s hoping to do is what he did before there was fighting: patch broken arms and legs.

But quickly, all falls apart, and he’s faced with the impossible, trying to save those hit by random bullets, suicide bombs, by various militias on all sides. Shia vs. Sunni, Isis vs. Kurds, Al Queda never going away. His hospital drowns in blood.

Sharif’s weapon in response: a camera supplied to him by the film’s director, Zaradasht Ahmed, who—two cameras in all– films Sharif making a video record of the dying of Iraq. What this Iraqi shoots, as a moral witness, is harrowing and excruciating, sometimes impossible to watch. Various people lying on their backs in tents, wasting their lives away as they’ve been paralyzed by bullets or bombs. Children mourning their relatives in zipped-up body bags. Children themselves, wounded and stunned. Cars torn apart by bombs, cars caught in crossfire in which the occupants have been murdered.

(Dear George W. Dear Dick Cheney. Dear Donald Rumsfeld: You should be watching this film, you smug bastards, to see what you did to Iraq.)

And, yes, things get even worse. Isis attacks Jawalwa, and all those working in the hospital need to flee. Nori Sharif, who has been filming victims, becomes a victim himself, driving with his family into the boiling desert to escape. He says of the slaughter: “Like an evil witch, it follows our path.”

How palpable is the combat in Nowhere to Hide! As Sharif turns his camera in his car on his sweet, adorable, innocent children, I felt my non-religious self almost praying that nobody harms them, that no plane drops a bomb on them. Sharif tries to sound optimistic: “In the end the will to build will triumph over the will to destroy,” but the reality is that his family now, in 2017, are squeezed into a displaced person camp, where anything can happen to them.

(Dear Donald Trump: Their home town no longer exists, leveled by Isis. I know there’s no chance, you uncaring bastard, that you’d ever allow Nori Sharif’s family to resettle in the USA. Illegal immigrants.)

As Iraq collapses, Sharif amends his thoughts on the war: “Thousands are killed, not just the dumb. And even the opportunists don’t benefit from it in the end.” But he remains as compassionate at ever, mourning the deaths of members of the Iraqi army, his seeming Shia enemies, saying, “How bad for their families.”


Gerald Peary is a retired film studies professor at Suffolk University, Boston, curator of the Boston University Cinematheque, and the general editor of the “Conversations with Filmmakers” series from the University Press of Mississippi. A critic for the late Boston Phoenix, he is the author of nine books on cinema, writer-director of the documentaries For the Love of Movies: the Story of American Film Criticism and Archie’s Betty, and a featured actor in the 2013 independent narrative Computer Chess.

Share
Tweet
Pin
Share

By: Gerald Peary Filed Under: Featured, Film, Review Tagged: documentary, Iraq, museum-of-fine-arts-boston, Nori Sharif, Nowhere to Hide

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Search

Popular Posts

  • Concert Review: Goose Earns Its Indie-Groove Wings Goose has seen its stock in the jam-band world soar at... posted on March 26, 2023
  • Rock Concert Review: Bruce Springsteen at TD Garden — Largely Choreographed and Celebratory So yeah, mortality was a heavy theme in Bruce Springste... posted on March 22, 2023
  • Book Review: “Leon Russell: The Master of Space and Time’s Journey Through Rock & Roll History” Even more impressive than the sheer amount of raw knowl... posted on March 14, 2023
  • Classical Concert Review: The Boston Symphony Orchestra Plays Wolfe and Górecki Brimming with edge-of-seat intensity and fist-waving th... posted on March 17, 2023
  • Rock Concert Review: Elvis Costello — Proudly Flaunting his Dependability and Unpredictability Elvis Costello loves to visit various regions of the pa... posted on March 10, 2023

Social

Follow us:

Footer

  • About Us
  • Advertising/Underwriting
  • Syndication
  • Media Resources
  • Editors and Contributors

We Are

Boston’s online arts magazine since 2007. Powered by 70+ experts and writers.

Follow Us

Monthly Archives

Categories

"Use the point of your pen, not the feather." -- Jonathan Swift

Copyright © 2023 · The Arts Fuse - All Rights Reserved · Website by Stephanie Franz