Nina Davenport’s “Operation Filmmaker” is a cringe-making collection of cultural conflicts that illuminates the quantity of ego involved in any level of filmmaking as much as any movie in memory. Taking as her subject 25-year-old Muthana Mohmed, an Iraqi film student who’d been featured on MTV’s “True Life” and was hell-bent for Hollywood, Davenport follows him onto the set of Liev Schreiber’s directorial début, his adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, “Everything Is Illuminated.” Mohmed does not make the intern hall of fame, to put it simply, even before taking issue with “the Jewish theory” of the Holocaust as embodied in Schreiber’s project. Davenport’s moral misgivings as filmmaker after all heck breaks loose quickly suggest a kind of quagmire, and a telling parable of American involvement in other cultures that does not become ponderous, but blackly comic, about ego, prejudice and filmmaking’s myriad compromises. “Operation Filmmaker” is chaotic, but what a marvelous mess. 90m. (Ray Pride)
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