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Overlooked & Underrated Docs & Features
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Manhunt: The Inside Story of the Hunt for Osama Bin Laden
Produced and directed by accomplished documentary filmmaker Greg Baker, HBO’s “Manhunt” documents the two-decade long search for Osama Bin Laden. Comparisons with Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” are inevitable. That film is both a character study and procedural. Whereas “Manhunt” presents interviews with a variety of CIA analysts, targeters, and operatives who speak of the discovery and search for Bin Laden.
Among the interviewees are four women, part of an informal analysts group known as The Sisterhood. There were the first agents to identify al-Qaeda and its leader, Bin Laden. Their information fell on deaf ears, and they were criticized for spending too much time on Bin Laden, and were being too passionate. It seems that the Jessica Chastain’s “Zero Dark Thirty” character, Maya, is a composite derived from The Sisterhood whose warnings were first ignored and who were then blamed when the al-Qaeda strikes began.
“Manhunt” is a window on a hard-to-see world, and provides invaluable information for those wanting much more information on the behind-the-scenes hunt and the eventual attack on Bin Laden’s compound. The film explicitly and implicitly asks as many questions as it answers. In any case, “Manhunt” is a powerful documentary experience.
“Manhunt” is playing on HBO during the 2013 months of May and June. D. Schwartz May 3, 2013