The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

A British minister says on the radio that war is unforeseeable. In Washington and London, spin doctors and generals turn that sentence into a march to war. It is a comedy about how a casual remark, an unread report and a lot of swearing push two governments into invading a country that nobody in the room has seen.

Why it’s here: The film is about how a war gets made by people trying to protect their jobs. What's punk is that no one in power is spared, and the funniest scenes are the ones where a decision is made by the person who has read the least. What's pedagogical is how clearly it exposes the pipeline from soundbite to policy. Close relatives: The Death of Stalin (same director, already in the catalog) and Dr. Strangelove. Note: very profane.

Noujaim spent the weeks of the 2003 Iraq invasion inside Al Jazeera's newsroom in Doha, Qatar, and in the US military's media center nearby. We meet an Al Jazeera producer, a veteran editor and a Marine press officer, and all of them are trying to tell the same war to different audiences.

Why it’s here: The film is a lesson in how the same event becomes two stories. What's punk is the way it takes the network Americans were told to distrust and lets us see how it works. What's pedagogical is that it gives students a frame for asking who is telling this and why. Pairs with Manufacturing Consent and This Is Not Propaganda. Note: made in 2004, so it's a time capsule; the Marine press officer, Josh Rushing, later joined Al Jazeera, which the film doesn't show.