The Dunedin International Film Festival again brings scenes and stories from around the world to cinema screens here, from July 25. Among the documentary offerings is a telling tale of incompetency in Iraq, Richard Leiby, of The Washington Post, reports.
Charles H. Ferguson is a policy wonk.
By his own admission, "kind of a geek".
His latest book, published by Brookings Institution Press in 2004, was titled The Broadband Problem: Anatomy of a Market Failure and a Policy Dilemma.
Yet here he sits now, an MIT PhD with a buzz-worthy film on his resume.
He is the writer, director and producer of No End in Sight, a documentary that took him to the blood-drenched streets of Baghdad, where he shot footage for his first-ever movie.
It catalogues, like no other film to date, the array of failures in planning and early decision-making in Iraq.
In awarding No End in Sight a special prize at Sundance this year, the jury called it a "timely work that clearly illuminates the misguided policy decisions that have led to the catastrophic quagmire of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq".
Ferguson's credentials as a former Brookings Institution fellow and lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations could have translated to utter boredom on the big screen - especially has he had never owned a video camera before deciding to become a moviemaker a couple of years ago.
And No End might have failed as a dilettante's vanity project - Ferguson (52) put up $2 million from his own pocket to make it.
"I don't have to worry about working for a living," he allows over lunch in Washington, while promoting his movie.
Did we mention that Ferguson developed a revolutionary Web page application that his start-up company sold to Microsoft in 1996 for $133 million?
Lean, tan and self-assured, he has the demeanor of a man unaccustomed to failure.
Despite the warnings of several acquaintances in the journalism and film worlds that Iraq was too complicated, dangerous and expensive a subject for a first-timer, he drew a bead on a narrow target.
In early 2004, Ferguson, who holds a doctorate in political science, was intrigued by some obvious questions - how did things go wrong in Iraq and who was to blame? He expected that somebody else with documentary expertise would beat him to the topic.
He says he deliberated for a year before he realized "no-one else was" and finally told himself, "Screw it, I'm going to make this movie"
"This is the first time I've made a film and I'm sure I made a lot of mistakes," Ferguson says.
But his tyro's modesty cloaks a healthy ego and keen intellect.
Ferguson is smart enough to know what he doesn't know.
And he surrounds himself with people who have the skills to help him succeed.
He did this in the case of filmmaking - recruiting Oscar-nominated documentarian Alex Gibney (the film-maker behind Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) as executive producer and "the eminence looking over my shoulder," as Ferguson puts it.
Before making his own picture, Ferguson reached out to well-informed journalists, including New Yorker writer George Packer, whose coverage presaged Iraq's death spiral.
"I gave him a lot of names of people to talk to. I was sort of handing over my interview list to him," says Packer, who is interviewed in the film.
"And he did a very thorough job, especially in getting people to talk on camera who hadn't talked before."
Among them: Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, who tells Ferguson in the film that a decision to disband the Iraqi army "came as quite a surprise" to him, Secretary of State Colin Powell and others in the administration.
"I thought we'd just created a problem: We had a lot of out-of-work soldiers."
The film says that edict by then occupation chief L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer not only blindsided the State Department but also the US military command - and reversed a plan endorsed by President Bush to re-muster, pay and put to work hundreds of thousands of ex-fighters, who were poised to help secure and rebuild Iraq.
When Ferguson decided to shoot footage in Iraq, he lined up the best security money could buy.
He went to Baghdad during a particularly parlous time, about five weeks after the 2006 bombing of the Shi'ite shrine at Samarra.
He departed from Irbil in Iraqi Kurdistan with a convoy of four armored pickup trucks equipped with machine gun turrets, he says, and managed to avoid three roadside bombs on a six-hour ride.
In Baghdad he spent $6000 a day on 10 bodyguards and three armored cars for himself and his Iraqi crew.
"We never went back to the same place twice and never stayed more than a half-hour," Ferguson says.
As for the future of Iraq, with or without American involvement? It is worth mentioning here, in the end, that even this deeply-schooled policy analyst must admit: "I don't know. I don't think anybody does."
