The makers of the world’s biggest blockbuster unveiled the first Hollywood action movie shot entirely in Arabic Wednesday at the Venice film festival.
Every line in Mosul, based on the Iraqi police’s Nineveh SWAT team, whose members fought to take back their home city from the Islamic State, is in Iraqi dialect.
Its producers Joe and Anthony Russo—who made Avengers: Endgame the biggest grossing movie of all time—said they “did not hesitate for a second” about making the blistering epic of house-to-house battles in anything but its original language.
Joe Russo said he cried when he first read an account of the unit, made up of officers who had lost family to IS, in the New Yorker magazine.
“I’d never read a piece of journalism and cried at the end. The plight of this team and everyone in Mosul brought me to tears. That needed to be told as authentically as possible. There was no other way to make it,” he insisted.
With Hollywood frequently accused of demeaning and demonizing Arabs, the producers said that they hoped the movie would become a turning point in the way Muslims were portrayed on the big screen.
It is also the first film to come out of the Russo Brother’s new studio, AGBO, and Joe Russo said “we couldn’t be prouder of it.” AFP