Rebel Yell

Michael Tucker's sound bites are typical of most independent documentary filmmakers. "What do I need funding for?" he asks without a trace irony when discussing budgets. And although his first film, 2004's Gunner Palace, was a commercial success because of its theatrical release, he admits he likes the confines of the TV hour. "It's good to have limits up front, because it forces you to focus more," he says. As a relative newcomer to the doc scene - his second feature film, The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, has its world premiere this month at the Toronto International Film Festival - it's possible Tucker simply hasn't yet learned his lines. What's more likely, however, is that this is a filmmaker willing to break the mold.

Until a recent move to upstate New York, Tucker and his co-director and wife, Petra Epperlein, ran their prodco Nomados on a farm outside of Berlin, isolated from the big media hubs. An architect by training, Epperlein is methodical and organized - the planner of the duo. After a meeting at the 2003 Realscreen Summit led to Tucker's first opportunity to go to Baghdad, it was Epperlein who asked the critical question: what story are you going to tell that other people aren't telling? "There are so many films on Iraq now and there are only so many slots and strands. The only way to survive is to make something that really stands out," says Tucker, who handles the more intrepid duties of filmmaking, while Epperlein acts as editor and critic as well as contributor. "I think this is the most brutally competitive thing I've ever done," he adds.

The observation is indicative of the team's savvy approach to filmmaking, which is to take council with sales reps and commissioning editors in order to really understand what the market is demanding, and then make sure their film fills that gap, while staying true to their unique voice. A raw, verité glimpse of the early days of the war in Iraq, Gunner Palace follows a company of soldiers living in a bombed-out compound that once belonged to Uday Hussein. The Prisoner picks up where Gunner leaves off, but hindsight and experience make the pair's sophomore effort much more pointed. In a crisp 54 minutes, it tells how Iraqi journalist Yunis Abbas was wrongfully interrogated and imprisoned by American forces for plotting to kill British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "When you get into this subjectmatter, you have to call a spade a spade," says Tucker. "I really feel [Abbas'] anger. You can jump around all you want and say it's not political and it's impartial, but this is what happened to him. At some point, you can't avoid the politics of it."

Thom Powers, the programmer of TIFF's Real to Reel program, contends that just as Gunner led the wave of observational docs that flooded the market at the beginning of the war, Prisoner signals a trend towards docs that aren't afraid to be critical of what's happening in Iraq. "The war has been going on for three years, so people can now start to break it down analytically," he explains. "Tucker is in a good position to do that because of his previous film; this isn't the work of a filmmaker who's in Iraq for the first time."