The Fight for Fallujah / La batalla de Falluja
2016 · 11m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Ben C. Solomon
Genres: documentary, war
Tones: contemplative, tense
Filmed for virtual reality, this documentary follows Iraqi forces as they fight to retake Fallujah from ISIS. Viewers experience the battle firsthand alongside the soldiers.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
VR war doc sounds like a gimmick until you realize Solomon's refusing the usual embedded-reporter distance—the formal gambit of *being there* actually exposes how little we let soldiers' interiority breathe in traditional coverage, which is genuinely unsettling.
A formally rigorous experiment in documentary's relationship to presence and mediation; the VR apparatus becomes a considered argument about spectatorship and witness, situating itself deliberately within post-Vertov debates about what the camera can claim to show.
The decision to shoot VR isn't spectacle here—it's restraint; by refusing to cut away or montage the confusion of close-quarters combat, Solomon lets the spatial disorientation do the moral work, and that single formal commitment transforms a combat film into something about the texture of fear itself.