Creating art amid the chaos of war

December 17, 2008 When Iraqi film student Emad Ali set out to make an innocent portrait of Baghdad's Shabandar Cafe, nobody anticipated the destruction that would follow. When a suicide bomb destroyed the legendary literary haunt, Ali returned to complete filming in a move that all but cost him his life. Such is the price of filmmaking across many war-torn regions of the world where filmmakers regularly take great risks, or sometimes simply can't avoid them, to bring a project home.

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