Saddam’s Road to Hell

Synopsis: Filmmaker Gwynne Roberts and a team of investigators led by Dr Mohammed Ihsan, Kurdistan’s Human Rights Minister, set off in an armoured convey across postwar Iraq to find out what happened to 8,000 Kurdish men and boys who went missing in the early years of Saddam Hussein’s rule. The evidence will become a vital part of the indictment against Saddam at his trial in Baghdad. The film shows backstreet shops where lawyers looking for evidence can buy documents looted from secret police archives, skeletons being dug out of mass graves in the desert, and videos of torturers blowing up prisoners or throwing them off rooftops. All the time, the threat of assassination hangs over the investigators. Made for the PBS series Frontline/World.

NB The film has been shown on television stations in 20 countries but not so far in the UK.
Language: English
Country: United States
Year of release: 2006
Year of production: 2006
Notes: See article by Nick Cohen in The Observer dated 2/7/06 (p.11)
Documentation: Related website giving background information and containing an audio interview with the filmmaker at http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/iraq501/video_index.html
Subjects: Media studies; Politics & government
Keywords: censorship; Hussein, Saddam; Iraq; massacres