THE SUNDANCE INSTITUTE has strong ties to contemporary Latin American cinema, so perhaps it's no surprise that Robert Redford first asked Walter Salles to make a film about Che Guevara's youthful journeys through Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Brazil. "It was extremely tempting, but on the other hand it was also sacred territory," the Motorcycle Diaries director said during a recent visit to the Bay Area. "Sacred because it had to do with a man who changed the very nature of my continent."

Salles finally agreed on the condition that he be allowed to do the necessary research. His groundwork included many trips to Cuba, where he visited Havana's Che Guevara Studies Center, presided over by Guevara's widow, Aleida March. "They granted us access to so many photos, letters, and other material used by the writer [José Rivera] in the screenplay," he said, adding that photos taken by Guevara had a special influence on the finished film, even if it's primarily based on Guevara's memoirs and on Traveling with Che Guevara, by Alberto Granado. "Che's photographs were always photographs of people. He was much more interested in the human geography than in the physical geography. He was taken by the people he met throughout his journey, and this became the inspiration for us."

In a strange way, Salles and the young Guevara had something in common: a severe case of saudede, a longing for what one can't have. In Salles's case, the longing was for Brazil, a country he -- the son of a Brazilian diplomat -- only knew from a distance during most of his childhood. "I started this film thinking that I was a Brazilian filmmaker," he said, "and finished it understanding I was not only a Brazilian filmmaker but a Latin American filmmaker." (Judy Stone)

Now recording

Last week the inanity of the presidential campaign finally gave way to hardcore political pornography, as the Bush cabal orchestrated the obscene display of America actually thanking itself for unjustly, illegally, brutally invading and occupying Iraq. The sock puppet on the hand of the empire in this shameless act of self-pleasuring was, of course, ex-Central Intelligence Agency asset Ayad Allawi, stumping for candidate Bush before Congress. Through some mix-up, apparently, the press presumed Allawi – who dares not leave his walled compound in the Green Zone and mix with ordinary Iraqis for fear of being assassinated – was actually speaking for Iraq.

But Iraqis are more than capable of speaking for themselves if we are prepared to listen. To judge by an excellent new documentary screening at the eighth annual Cinemayaat Arab Film Festival, listening can be revelatory. About Baghdad is an altogether impressive and wide-ranging survey of the opinions, perspectives, desires, and memories voiced by ordinary Baghdadis from many walks of life: manual laborers, art history professors, doctors, students, public servants, businessmen, mental patients, the unemployed, survivors of Saddam Hussein's prisons (including individuals behind a 1982 assassination attempt), mothers, musicians, poets, and others. Filmed in July 2003 by independent collective InCounter Productions, the range of views on display here far outstrips the perspective or agenda of any one group, including the filmmakers. The result is capably and artfully constructed, but ultimately it's the myriad faces and voices we encounter that make About Baghdad so complex, challenging, and affecting.

Iraqis are asked about the legacy of Hussein's regime, about the past dozen years of multiple wars and devastating sanctions, and about their thoughts on the American invasion and occupation. They answer with the individuality and nuance one would expect from any other people. No one, however, has a good thing to say about the Hussein regime (except a man in the yard of a mental hospital who claims to be working for him). The primary concerns of Iraqis are the basics of a society, still kept from them more than a year after About Baghdad was filmed: full and reliable electricity and water, medical supplies and aid, and employment. That these things are so long in coming is cause for concern, griping, outrage, and patience – most of the people interviewed seem willing to wait and see before giving up on American promises. But the call for an independent government is also widespread. These individuals express a much more explicit and sophisticated understanding of democracy than Bush, the man who pretends to be the world's expert on it, ever has.

Sinan Antoon, a member of InCounter, is a poet, scholar, and educator living in America. He fled his home in Baghdad in 1991, he tells the filmmakers, "to escape the whole stifling atmosphere of Saddam and tyranny." Antoon acts as the principal interlocutor here; partly in the frame from time to time, he adds a few passing remarks to a narration otherwise composed of interviews and the occasional explanatory intertitle. He enters the action fully at least once, during an unexpectedly heated political discussion with a Baghdad cabdriver.

Due to funding constraints, About Baghdad was shot in a feverish three weeks of 12-hour days, amid the city's scorching summer heat. The crew's urgent work translates into a well-composed but insistent pace. While the camera lingers on a child in a polluted lot, or the face of a mother who has lost her children to Hussein's prisons or American bombs, or a group of men gathered on a street waiting to express their opinions, its inclination is to move through the city in search of more. We see cityscapes rolling by the car window: boarded up storefronts and deserted streets in the heart of the market district; the facades of buildings pristine, damaged, and condemned; yards littered with garbage or awash in sewage; bombed-out libraries and schools. Meanwhile, the faces crowding the streets, public buildings, homes, and offices of Baghdad compete for time and space on the screen, sometimes sharing, sometimes overlapping or even threatening to pile pell-mell one on top of another.

The soundtrack offers an affecting counterpoint to this collage style in renowned Iraqi singer and musician Amer Tawfiq's exceptionally beautiful renditions of classic Iraqi songs. Recorded specifically for the film, Tawfiq's deeply stirring, sonorous voice, complemented by his oud's pensive cascade of notes, anchors the camera's restless energy with a profound expression of human longing unshaken by timetables or political ephemera. Tawfiq, who refused to sing the praises of Hussein under his regime, has the first line in the film: "Are we ready to record?" A straightforward question from a musician positioned at a studio microphone. But placed at the outset of the film, it acts as a subtler and wider invitation. After all, the recording was made. Are we ready to listen? (Robert Avila)

Cinemayaat Arab Film Festival runs Oct. 2-24. This week's venues are the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, S.F.; Roxie Cinema, 3117 16th St., S.F.; Tarboosh, 837 Jefferson, Redwood City; and Camera 12 Cinema, 201 S. Second St., San Jose. For shows and times, see Film listings. For information on tickets ($8-$55), go to www.aff.org.

'About Baghdad' screens Oct. 6, 6:45 p.m., Camera 12 Cinema; Oct. 9, 5:45 p.m., United Artists Berkeley 7, 2274 Shattuck, Berk.