Working alone in Iraq over eight months, director/cinematographer Laura Poitras creates an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Iraqis living under U.S. occupation. Her Oscar-nominated film My Country, My Country follows Dr. Riyadh, a physician and critic of the U.S. occupation who nonetheless supports democracy in Iraq and decides to run as a candidate in the tumultuous 2005 elections. Dramatically interwoven into the personal journey of Dr. Riyadh is the landscape of the US military occupation, with Australian private security contractors, American journalists and the UN officials who orchestrate the elections.

“The definitive non-fiction film about the occupation of Iraq! Indispensable, heartbreaking, and ferociously wise. Time and again Poitras manages to be where platoons of U.S. telejournalists were afraid to go…. The most valuable piece of film to emerge about the war.” —Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice

Laura Poitras was nominated for an Academy Award, an Independent Spirit Award, and an Emmy Award for My Country, My Country (2006), a documentary about the U.S. occupation of Iraq. My Country, My Country was co-produced with ITVS, released theatrically by Zeitgeist Films, and broadcast on P.O.V./PBS.

She received a Peabody Award and was nominated for an Emmy and an Independent Spirit Award for Flag Wars (2003; made with Linda Goode Bryant), a documentary about gentrification that premiered at the SXSW Film Festival and won the award for Best Documentary.

Poitras is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation/Tribeca Film Institute. She has attended the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Storytelling and Edit Lab as both a Fellow and creative advisor. Her work has received support from the Independent Television Service (ITVS), P.O.V./American Documentary, Creative Capital, Sundance Documentary Film Program, Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund, the Vital Projects Fund, NYSCA, Jerome Foundation, Chicken and Egg Pictures, and others.