Control Room (film)
| Control Room | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Jehane Noujaim |
| Produced by | Hani Salama Rosadel Varela |
| Written by |
Julia Bacha Jehane Noujaim |
| Starring |
Samir Khader Josh Rushing |
| Music by |
Thomas DeRenzo Hani Salama |
| Cinematography | Jehane Noujaim |
| Edited by | Julia Bacha Lilah Bankier Charles Marquardt Alan Oxman |
| Distributed by | Magnolia Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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84 min. |
| Country | United States |
| Language |
Arabic English |
| Budget | ~$60,000 |
| Box office | $2,586,511 |
Control Room is a 2004 documentary film about Al Jazeera and its relations with the US Central Command (CENTCOM), as well as the other news organizations that covered the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Made by Egyptian-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim, the film was distributed by Magnolia Pictures (owned by 2929 Entertainment).
People featured in the film include Lieutenant Josh Rushing, a press officer from US Central Command, David Shuster, an NBC correspondent, and Tom Mintier, a CNN correspondent. Al Jazeera was represented by Samir Khader, a senior producer, Hassan Ibrahim, a Sudanese journalist who attended American universities and headed the BBC Arab News Service before joining Al Jazeera, and Dima Khatib, a Syrian journalist and a producer at Al Jazeera. Samir Khader later became the editor of Al-Jazeera. Josh Rushing started working for Al Jazeera English in 2006, Shuster started working for Al Jazeera America in 2013.
Control Room documents the spectrum of opinion that surrounds the Qatar television news network Al Jazeera. Throughout the film, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appears at press conferences, complaining about the propagandist nature of Al Jazeera. Paradoxically, another clip shows Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi Minister of Information, accusing the television organization of transmitting American propaganda. The contrasting views between the documentary's central figures are not so clear cut. Early in the movie, press officer Lt. Rushing remarks that Al Jazeera's bias leads it to focus exclusively on American tanks and Iraqi casualties, yet he later confides that agencies such as Fox News also appear to hand-pick their material, and he sees what both sides leave out. Samir Khader, a senior producer of Al Jazeera, claims the network's purpose is to shake up the rigid infrastructure of Arab society, which he believes has fallen behind, culturally and technologically, because of its social intolerance to other cultures and perspectives.
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