© John Preston / The Telegraph / April 03, 2009 →

There are, of course, many ways to attract viewers' attention in television documentaries. Of these, weepingly begging for sympathy has rather fallen out of vogue. But Sean McAllister, I suspect, is on a mission to change that.

Japan: a Story of Love and Hate (Monday, BBC Four) began with a shot of someone's feet, wearing trainers. Jerkily, and none too speedily, the feet jogged through a barren concrete landscape. Then came a semi-coherent voice muttering disconsolately about being depressed and drinking too much.

Both the feet and the voice turned out to belong to Sean McAllister, who had originally gone to Japan to make a film about what makes 'the country tick'.

For some reason, possibly to do with the drinking and the depression, this had failed to materialise. Now, McAllister had 'one last chance' to make a film - any film - which illuminated a previously shaded area of Japanese life.

In a small rural town, he met a 56-year-old man called Naoki. Once, Naoki had been wealthy - he ran a business employing 70 staff. But he'd lost all his money in Japan's 1992 economic crash. Now he lived with his 29-year-old girlfriend, Yoshie, in a tiny, windowless room and worked for the Post Office earning the equivalent of £3.50 an hour.

Everything in Naoki's life - job, finances, relationship - was teetering on the brink of disaster. Especially his relationship. 'She hates me,' he said of Yoshie, who lay sprawled on the bed two feet away and made no move to quibble with this. The two of them were members of Japan's new 'working poor'. Although they had jobs, they couldn't afford to live on their combined salaries.

Periodically, McAllister would offer sharp yet characteristically doleful observations of his own: 'I couldn't help noticing there was no physical contact between them,' he said at one point. 'No, no,' cried Naoki with terrible mordant glee. 'I have no sex.' He pointed at his crotch. 'Doesn't work... Broken... No money for Viagra.'

Here was a rare case of a documentary that worked on two levels. As well as revealing a hidden side of Japan, it was also a portrait of a friendship. Naoki and McAllister plainly liked one another and as the filming progressed, so their friendship grew. For years, Naoki had refused to meet Yoshie's family - partly out of embarrassment: he was the same age as Yoshie's father. When McAllister accompanied Yoshie to see her family, her father asked him just one question during the entire visit: the price of Viagra in London.

Eventually, Naoki relented and agreed to meet Yoshie's parents. Trying to break the ice, McAllister presented the men with a gift - a packet of Viagra each. This was a wonderful moment, both very funny and extremely touching. The two men's faces lit up with delight. 'His dick doesn't work either!' said Naoki. 'Just like mine.' By the end of a film that shone with great humanity, things hadn't improved that dramatically for Naoki and Yoshie - yet the darkness was a little less thick than before. As Naoki said to McAllister, 'You broke my shadow.'

© Sam Wollaston / The Guardian / March 31, 2009 →

There's no unrealistic sex in Japan: A Story of Love and Hate (BBC4). No sex at all in fact, even though Naoki and his girlfriend Yoshie live together in the town of Yamagata, north of Tokyo. The one messy, windowless room they share isn't exactly conducive to it, and Yoshie's too tired from her three jobs. They haven't even spoken for weeks, let alone had sex. Anyway Naoki, who's 57, can't any more. "Doesn't work," he says, pointing down there. "Broken." There's no money for Viagra.

This is a side of Japan you rarely see. Dead poor, for a start, and miserable. A place of stupid rules and intimidation at work (the kind of intimidation that makes your spirit rot, says Naoki), of battling just to stay afloat, of depression and high suicide numbers. Even Sean McAllister, the English filmmaker, is depressed, after struggling for two years in a country he doesn't understand and which won't accept him.

Except for the lovely Naoki, a rare maverick, the nail in the Japanese proverb that stands out and should be banged in, but that has somehow escaped the hammer. Once an entrepreneur with a BMW, now a postal worker with nothing, he's a brilliant character - honest and philosophical, with a lovely, resigned laugh. And this is a brilliant, original film. Man, is it depressing, though.

There is some light, some hope that Naoki and Yoshie won't be ground down and end up killing themselves, or each other. Naoki agrees to visit Yoshie's parents for the very first time. Her father, who's the same age as Naoki, disapproves of him, but he is welcoming, to Sean and his camera as well. The house has windows, there's beer, talk and laughter. There may even be love later: Sean has brought a packet of Viagra. It's for Yoshie's dad, who also suffers from Naoki's down-there problem, but maybe he'll share. And then they all go out to a bar, to sing. Hope through karaoke, as so often is the way.

© Andrew Billen / The Times / March 31, 2009 →

BBC Four's Japanese season is proving that there are right and wrong ways to scrutinise a thus supposedly inscrutable nation. Two weeks ago Marcel Theroux showed us the wrong way, bouncing off in wide-eyed search of the spiritual concept of Wabi Sabi and coming back with the news that it was all very Japanese and unknowable.

And last night Sean McAllister showed us the right way in Japan: A Story of Love and Hate. After, he said, two years trying and failing to prise open Japan's "sliding door", he gave up on Tokyo and moved to a small town 300 miles north. There he came across an eccentric called Naoki Sato. There is, we were told, a local saying that "the nail that stands out most must be hammered down". Naoki Sato, a part-time post office worker with a Beatles haircut, was that outstanding nail, and how he had been hammered! A former Maoist revolutionary, he had enthusiastically taken up capitalism in his thirties and owned two companies, a bar and a BMW. In 1992, however, the economy crashed and Naoki became one of Japan's "new" or, as he put it, "usual" poor. Now 56, he lived in a tiny windowless room, his only break from the housework the seven hours a day that he spent collecting insurance premiums for the post office.

To add to Naoki's problems, he was three-times divorced, had rowed terminally with his family, and was now living with Yoshie, a much younger woman, whose night job was to talk to lonely businessmen who did not know how to converse. I suppose you could say that Yoshie sold oral sex. But she and Naoki no longer talked themselves. All you could guess from her tabula rasa face was that she despised him (and you would guess wrong).

What was splendid about Naoki was that this instinctive dissident in a congenitally conformist society had an albeit mordant sense of humour. Everywhere he took us, tragedy and comedy jostled for the foreground. In his office, daily workouts were complemented by comical ritual bollockings and communal chanting ("slow driving, slow driving, don't hit pedestrians") - but his sleepy-eyed colleague in the pullover was so full of narcotics, Naoki explained, that some days he did not wake up in the morning. Naoki had a friend called Mr Mushroom Man because he obsessively picked wild mushrooms. But Mushroom Man also had his tale. His brother, crushed by a business culture of bullying, was among the 30,000 Japanese who kill themselves each year.

This microcosm of a repressed, over-medicated, economically blasted society was unexpectedly relieved by the film-maker himself, when McAllister cajoled Naoki to visit his girlfriend's father, something he had been ashamed to do because they were exactly the same age. McAllister, however, had had intimate conversations with both men and saw a chance for them to connect over a shared gift of Viagra. At first this peace offering looked like a shocking breach of etiquette, but the gesture opened things no end. Yoshie's father turned out to be as much a believer in openness as his daughter's impotent boyfriend. Suddenly Naoki had a family again. The film produced a true and unexpected insight. Instead of going to Japan to look for answers, the West might credit itself with having worked out, in the past few decades, some of its own.

© Paul Whitelaw / The Scotsman / March 31, 2009 →

WESTERN documentaries about Japan frequently concentrate on the wackier aspects of the country's culture in lieu of actual depth and are often superficial and patronising. So hallelujah for British director Sean McAllister's refreshingly perceptive film, Japan: A Story of Love and Hate, which picked apart the clichés to reveal the truth behind the regimented façade of Japanese city life.

After living in Japan for two years, McAllister was getting nowhere in his efforts to make a revealing documentary about the country. Depressed and drinking too much (the film began with him jogging, out of breath and sweating profusely, delivering a desperate monologue to camera), he had almost given up - until he met Naoki, 56, a part-time postal worker. This seemingly unremarkable man turned out to be the perfect subject for McAllister's documentary. Naoki - a lean, toothsome chap, with a wry smile and wheezing laugh - had once owned a thriving private business, but when Japan's economy crashed in the 1990s, he lost everything, and now was scraping by on the equivalent of about £4,000 a year. Enter the harsh reality of Japan's "working poor".

A thin wall away from homelessness, Naoki lived in what was laughably described as a one-room apartment. In reality it was more like a windowless, strip-lit box. Living there alone would be hellish enough, but the box actually belonged to Yoshie, 29, Naoki's girlfriend.

She worked 15 hours a day in three jobs, the worst being as a hired date for married businessmen. It was sleazy and bleak, and obviously pained her greatly. Returning home from drunken evenings, she would often berate Naoki before falling asleep from a cocktail of booze and sleeping pills. In the morning she wouldn't remember a thing.

Naoki and Yoshie's relationship was one of desperate co-dependence, rather than a romantic partnership, as Naoki was unable to perform sexually since the financial crash. We never even saw them kiss.

And yet, rather than wallow in self-pity, Naoki regarded his situation with a kind of hard-won irreverence. Within a society shamed by a shockingly high suicide rate, Naoki refused to be destroyed by his relentlessly unrewarding work-cycle and seemingly hopeless prospects.

It was this, plus the affectionate interplay between McAllister and Naoki, that gave the film its heart. With Naoki finally accepted into Yoshie's hitherto disapproving family, it even had a happy ending of sorts. This was an exemplary film, featuring perhaps the most eye-opening depiction of modern Japan I've ever seen

© Simon Horsford / The Telegraph / March 30, 2009 →

The film-maker Sean McAllister wanted to discover what made Japan tick, but it took him two years to stumble upon the perfect subject: 56-year-old Naoki. Naoki used to have everything - his own business, a six-bedroom house and a flashy car - but lost it all in the crash of the early Nineties. Divorced three times, he now lives with his girlfriend, 29-year-old Yoshie, who works 15 hours a day to support him. Her three jobs include evening work in a sleazy bar where she is paid to flirt with and flatter rich, married men. Naoki's earning potential is markedly lower. At his age the only work he can find is a part-time job in a post office. Their relationship is a strange one - "She hates me, I need her," says Naoki. Both suffer from depression and Naoki admits that they do not have sex. McAllister's documentary touchingly captures the dark side of the Japanese dream. The second richest country in the world, Japan prides itself on being egalitarian, says McAllister, but Naoki and Yoshie represent the new "working poor". As with his previous films (such as Working for the Enemy and Hull's Angel), McAllister discovers maverick characters living lives far away from the norm.

© Hannah Pool / The Guardian G2 / March 30, 2009 →

This awkward but engaging documentary follows Naoki Sato, a radical communist turned part-time postman. Naoki lives in his girlfriend Yoshie's tiny flat, earns £3.50 an hour and relies on her for handouts. Yoshie has three jobs, spends her evenings entertaining "clients" in sushi bars, and brings home £11,000 a year. This is the life of Japan's "working poor". She takes a "calm down" pill every night; he thinks of suicide. Their troubled relationship makes compelling viewing.

© Ian Johns / The Observer / March 29, 2009 →

Director Sean McAllister bonds with fiftysomething Naoki, a successful entrepreneur until Japan's economic decline in the 1990s, who now works part-time for the post office. He'd be homeless without girlfriend Yoshie - herself holding down three jobs fuelled by sleeping pills and anti-depressants - and her tiny, rural-town flat. At the post office it's "like communism pretending to be capitalism" with its daily communal exercises and talk of targets. For three-time divorcee Naoki. "No one talks in Japan, people get frustrated, families break up and it leads to suicide." This offers a strikingly frank portrait of Japan's "working poor" but still manages to end on a positive note.

© Will Hodgkinson / The Guardian / March 28, 2009 →

Initially planning to make a documentary on Tokyo, Sean McAllister ended up going to the village of Yamagata to meet Naoki, a former bomb-throwing anarchist and successful entrepreneur until the economic crash of 1992 and now a postal worker. This charismatic rebel is used to illustrate the crushing obedience of Japanese culture and the myth of the perfection of the materialistic life. "This is a part of Japan," says Naoki, among the country's new poor with his girlfriend Yoshie, who words as an escort to married men. In being a portrait of a couple as well as the impossible pressure of Japanese culture, McAllister's film is compelling.

© Radio Times / March 28, 2009 →

Japan is a global beacon of efficiency, innovation and prosperity... isn't it? This extraordinary documentary moves away from the neon showboating of Tokyo to a small rural town that's home to Naoki, a charming 56-year-old divorcee whose businesses failed in the crash of 1992. Naoki offers insights that only a true outsider can: he no longer buys into his nation's culture of stifled emotions and obedient toil but can't escape it, and now lives with his blank-faced girlfriend in a windowless, two-room flat. Their odd symbiosis adds another layer to the film's fascinating revelations about Japan's hidden underclass.

© Rebecca Frankel / FourDocs / November 12, 2008 →

How to make a film using Sean McAllister's tried and perfected method:

1. Head to a hostile environment to report on an important political issue
2. Brutally collide camera lens with your topic head on
3. Realise your subject is a victim sprawled open for examination, like a bug in a petri dish, divorced from the context of its being and devoid of individual detail
4. Become depressed and think you're losing your way with no human narrative to grasp onto, as you drink and talk your frustrations through at night with a bar fixture
5. Leave, and almost give up on the facade of making a film, until you understand the one who propped you up with their near-immunity to the surrounding scenario is the one you must return to
6. Stake down your claim on this surviving social misfit whose eyes dance above a slouching spine, and attach yourself fast for the next 6 months
7. Question the basics until they laugh and reveal their seams
8. Spot the potential drama of their destiny, and divine it

Again, Sean McAllister has cast the most charismatic of characters, in another free spirited hero, at odds with his society and expected role. Welcome to Naoki and the class of working poor in Japan.

Japan: A Story of Love and Hate, was difficult to make, as the confessional and controversial jogging journey dialogue at the start lays testimony to. Misunderstood, misdirected a nd mistreating his own health, Sean saw the unrealistic expectations for social face, warped work ethics and high suicide statistics, yet was locked out of the society and could not access any emotional theme; he was running in circles with no viable entry to the core for years. The break through was Naoki, an ex-bar owner, an ex-home owner, an ex-brand-new-BMW-paid-in-cash-in-full owner, with ex-wives, and no conceivable assets or family of his own any more. Naoki was living in a capitalist Japanese hell, and provided Sean with a golden ticket into the madness demonstrated so aptly and absurdly with the show of communal exercises done at Naoki's place of work every morning. The insurance collection officers gather on command to raise their arms in an uninspired union of circles. "It was like watching communism parade as capitalism"; a poignant point in Sean's stylistic commentary.

The limitation of most films about Japan is their tendency to exoticise, as they paint beautiful portraits of individuals and isolation. In contrast, Sean does not merely show social anomie, but manages to slip inside, sit on the marital bed and split open the shadow hiding the man. This is quite a feat, and part of a poetic quote from near the end of the film that demonstrates Sean's special skill at building a rapport, and pulling out the essence in people who willingly hold up their arms in delight to be got, at last. Ignored and scorned by society, but legal never the less, they stamp down their foot and maintain their right to be themselves, yet tragically have no one around who wants to see them truly. Like Samir and Kevin in previous films, Naoki marches to his own tune, and once he recognizes and accepts that Sean can sense his capacity for living emotionally not rationally, he willing hands over his personality and future.

Naoki lives in a pill popping, feeling suppressing society, sharing a partnership and connection only with Yoshie, who is too tired to talk because she's paid to hear the surface woes of customers rejected by their own wives through convention. Collective customs and rituals over bear individual desires. And here is where a lesser documentary maker would be pulled up and out for intervening and meddling in the development of life playing out. For Sean helps implement change. But not in a manipulative way, and not in an excessive access to unrealistic resources way. He operates like a friend, offering an ear to hear talk of how it is, and press for how it may be. He dissects relationships, to prompt his protagonists to locate the veins, and ensure their survival, if that is wanted and needed. Which is admirable, and, also makes for a proper narrative arc in the film. We get a dramatically satisfying ending that extends the scope of the story, which is great and rare for a documentary that also offers subtle access to a closed and complex political context.

© Frame by Frame / November 10, 2008 →

'Japan: A Story of Love And Hate (dir. Sean McAllister) is also worth a mention. It's a film of juxtapositions - English filmmaker in Japan, Japanese worker with anti-establishment leanings, previous and present situations for its lead character Naoki... everything about it seemed to enhance the story of Naoki and a side of Japan not often seen in the Western World.'

© Sheffield International Documentary Festival (SIDF) / 2008 →

British documentary's sinner and saint, Sean McAllister, again offers extraordinary access and returns with an absorbing a portrait of inescapable contradictions, of life and the narrow lines love and hate share

© Denis Seguin / Screen International / March 22, 2005 →

A documentary that goes behind the daily headlines out of Iraq, The Liberace Of Baghdad focuses on a pianist whose professional career came to an abrupt end with the toppling of Saddam. Shot over eight months in Baghdad in 2004 at tremendous peril to its director Sean McAllister, not to mention his subject, the film provides a vital insight into the impact on civilian life of the US-led invasion and occupation.

The film, which premiered at Sheffield International Documentary Festival in November 2004, won a special jury prize at Sundance this year after screening in the newly-launched World Documentary Competition. While continued festival play is assured, the film's international theatrical prospects - it has already aired on the BBC in the UK - will depend on finding niche distributors who can lever the strong interest in Iraq and the high curiosity value of its idiosyncratic subject.

McAllister, whose 1998 documentary The Minders earned him the Royal Television Society's award for best documentary, is the consummate documentary film-maker. Committed beyond the call of journalistic duty, his presence is very much a part of the film.

Sent on a recce to Iraq by the BBC to find a story about everyday life in Baghdad, he passed several fruitless weeks chasing leads, returning each evening to his hotel to chat with the pianist in the lounge. Soon, he realised the pianist was the story and ending up spending most of the year eating, drinking and bunking with him. The film is culled from 110 40-minute tapes, from which editor Ollie Huddleston has done a remarkable job of extracting a nicely focused 75 minutes.

Peter, a Christian Arab, left Iraq in his 20s to study piano in Italy. When he returned Saddam was in charge and was beginning hostilities against neighbouring Iran. Peter was forced to join the army, served on the front and killed. After demobilisation he returned to Baghdad, started a family (his wife, a doctor, delivered one of Saddam's daughter) and slowly began to build a name as an instructor and performer. At his height he was earning $10,000 a month, enjoying a vast wardrobe and engaging in multiple affairs to the extent that his lavish lifestyle lead to the self-imposed moniker the Liberace of Baghdad.

The title puts the joke on Peter, especially for Western viewers for whom Liberace is better known as a camp icon rather than a style-setter. Indeed, judging by his few performances in the film, Peter's piano playing doesn't correspond with his claims or his aspirations to be the "Chopin of Iraq". But this only adds to the allure of this incongruous character with the hooded eyes and unfortunate pony-tail. With a cigarette perpetually between his lips, Peter proves a pragmatic guide to life during wartime: his mood, and hence the tone of the film, oscillates between bitingly satirical and deeply depressed. Forays to and from the hotel and Peter's suburban home continually darken that tone: a suicide bomb's aftermath forces them to walk, leading to an impromptu encounter with a woman's whose son is likely a victim of the attack.

Ironically, despite the promised liberation, Peter's great desire is to leave Iraq for the US where his estranged wife and two of their four children reside. Meanwhile, McAllister spends time with the two adult children who have remained in Baghdad; the daughter is particularly vociferous about the failed promise of the US occupation and yearns for the days of Saddam. Her steely reserve is shattered by the death of a neighbour, murdered for working with a US company.

What sets the film apart is the rapport between journalist and subject - McAllister and Peter were on top of each other during the shooting, hunkering down against air raids - and the camera is very much an extension of McAllister with the viewer is along for the ride.

As the weeks pass, and the kidnappings and beheadings of foreigners escalates, the film begins to feel like all-too-real reality TV. It reaches a climax when the pair become lost on the drive to Peter's house - street lights and traffic lights are things of the past - and end up in the no-man's-land that is the airport highway. As the two men, with cracking voices, attempt to joke that this may be the end of the film, and McAllister cringes with his camera into the passenger seat, one can't help doing the same.

© Jana Bennett / The Observer / Sunday, February 6, 2005 →

Independent film-maker Sean McAllister wandered into his Iraqi hotel bar, bored and frustrated that he was being prevented from making the film he had flown there to produce - about Saddam Hussein's trial.

Sitting at a piano, playing in this unlikely spot, was a former concert pianist. They struck up a conversation about the musician's life, concerns, aspirations and family - two of his children were Saddam supporters and one wanted to be westernised. Sean quickly realised this was the story he wanted to tell, recognising that it encapsulated the tensions and contrasts of the realities of life in the war-torn country.

The result was The Liberace of Baghdad, which last week won a world cinema documentary prize at the Sundance Film Festival for BBC Four's Storyville strand.

Here was a film-maker who was given the creative freedom and space to make the film he wanted, not exactly the one he had been commissioned to make - and was trusted by the BBC to deliver the best story he could for the audience.

© Will Hodgkinson / The Guardian / Tuesday, January 25, 2005 →

Sean McAllister planned to make a film about the state of Iraq after the war. Then he met the once-famous concert pianist Samir Peter, now making a living from playing in Baghdad's one operating, heavily fortified hotel, and focused on him instead. Samir, a charming one-time womaniser who is resigned to the fate of his country, is the perfect guide to it. By the look of things, McAllister was lucky to get back to England not only with his film, but also his life.

© Denis Seguin / The Times / January 25, 2005 →

SAMIR PETER is frowning. The self-described "Liberace of Baghdad" has just learnt that Liberace is better remembered as a gay icon than as a pianist. He slugs Sean McAllister, the director of the BBC documentary The Liberace of Baghdad. "You said it," says McAllister.

When they first sit down together, the two men make an unlikely pairing - the svelte Englishman and the woebegone Iraqi - but their rapport soon reflects the eight months they spent living in each other's pocket in Baghdad where Peter - an apt surname for a Christian Arab - tickled the ivories in the hotel piano bar. That's where they met, back in January 2004, when McAllister was on a three-week recce for the BBC's Storyville strand.

After Saddam's capture by American forces, Storyville's commissioning editor Nick Fraser was interested in a post-Saddam piece that would go behind the scenes to see how ordinary Iraqis live. McAllister, who earned kudos for the 1998 documentary The Minders, in which he turned his camera on the Iraqi government operatives who kept an eye on him during an assignment in the country, was the man for the job. But as the three weeks elapsed, McAllister was still looking for an angle.

"Each day I was going out looking for stories and each day I was coming back to the hotel and drinking wine with Samir," he says. Which is when he realised that his story was sitting behind the piano.

To say that Samir Peter had led a rollercoaster existence would be giving too much credit to rollercoasters. None is so steep, none has such twists. The son of wealthy parents, he studied piano at a conservatory in Ancona, Italy, for three years until his money ran out. "I knew many Italian women," he says, before embarking on a story about his first proper job as a "woman massager" and his time with a certain Signora Bianconi who took him in. A European tour ensued. He returned to Iraq shortly before Saddam took over leadership of the Baath Party and hence the country. Shortly after, Iraq declared war on Iran.

"I was at a party," says Peter, recalling the first twist. "It was 6 o'clock in the morning." Government agents, he says, were at the door, demanding that he accompany them to their headquarters. They forced him to "volunteer" for duty, and two weeks later he was in a Republican Army training camp. He served on the front and ending up stabbing to death an Iranian soldier, a deed he describes and indeed demonstrates in chilling detail.

On other details his memory is less precise: of the rest of his wartime service he refers vaguely to "friends" who engineered his exit from the army.

Returning to civilian life, he took up music instruction and started to build a name for himself as a concert pianist. His marriage to a doctor - she delivered one of Saddam's daughters - yielded four children but little conjugal bliss. On the other hand, there was the Liberace reference.

"I had the same life," Peter explains, "Many cars, many clothes. I had 350 shirts." And many, many affairs.

"Liberace means glamourous," McAllister adds helpfully. "You'd have liked to be called 'the Chopin of Iraq'."

McAllister, listening to similar exploits at the piano bar, was taken by this contradiction at the keyboard, a man who looks much older than his 56 years, perhaps because of rather than in spite of the wispy ponytail. Whether or not his stories were all true, the facts were plain: the Americans were in Baghdad, Saddam was deposed and Peter, who once earned $10,000 a month, was divorced, penniless and living in a basement room of the hotel, hoping for a visa to America. McAllister pitched the story - "his country has been liberated and now he's leaving" - and got the green light.

At first, subject and film-maker had differing views of what the film would be about. Peter says he agreed to participate in the film because he thought it would be about his music. But, he says, as weeks turned to months, and McAllister and his camera were constant companions, he started to reveal more and more personal details, and the film - as he says - "took a political turn".

For McAllister the change came when he met Peter's daughter - although his wife had left him taking two of their now-adult children, the other two, a son, Fahdi, and a daughter, Sahar, had remained, living in the family house. "When I met Sahar, that's when it got really interesting. Her conflict with Samir really interested me."

Like many Iraqis, Sahar initially welcomed the invasion, but after so many months of occupation she turned against the liberators. "Americans only make promises," she says in the film. McAllister recalls a scene left out of the film - remarkable considering that he shot 140 40-minute tapes - a moment when he asks Peter why his daughter loves Saddam. "Samir said, 'She doesn't love Saddam. She loves her country.' It's hard for people outside Iraq to understand what it means for the Americans to be on Iraqi soil. It was unthinkable to me, having been three times before."

Does Peter feel the American presence is a bad thing? "No. They want to rebuild the country. But the people of Saddam are still there and they are trying to stop them. Anyone who works with them, they kill them. Americans offer jobs but they are afraid to work with them. They have spies in the Green Zone."

McAllister has no doubt. "Look, I didn't go to Baghdad with a Michael Moore-agenda to nail the Americans." Although he was against the invasion, he says, he went "with an open mind to see what was going on, and for about four months I was the butt of the jokes of other journalists. I was saying: 'They're rebuilding. Give it time. Give it time.' But the more you see, the more you completely, utterly despair. It is a catastrophe beyond f****** belief. From small examples to big examples . . ." He shakes his head. "It's ten years in the making. This film will be topical for ten years."

As for Peter's future, at the time of going to press he's been out of Iraq for one month. He has his American visa - to attend the Sundance Film Festival, where the film had its world premiere - but the next steps are tentative. He will meet up with his former wife and wait for Sahar and Fahdi to join him from Jordan.

As for the home in Baghdad? Peter shrugs. "I locked the doors."

"His house-sitter was killed last week," says McAllister. "On the street. Thirty years old, driving through a disturbance with the resistance. When the Americans get shot at, they just spray. A bullet hit him in the head and another hit the gas tank. He burnt to death. Thirty years old and two kids. The random danger of ordinary life."

→ Clairborne Smith / Sundance Insider / Sunday, January 23, 2005 →

British filmmaker Sean McAllister's inroad to covering occupied Iraq arrived via the inscrutable logic of chance. Six months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, McAllister (Working for the Enemy) decided that it might be useful to go to Hotel Baghdad, amid the grenades and rocket launchers. "I wanted to make a film about what liberation meant for ordinary Iraqis," McAllister explains at the beginning of The Liberace of Baghdad. He was then "led astray," as he says in the film, by Samir Peter, a passionate, open-hearted Iraqi concert pianist who, in his heyday, earned $10,000 a month from his performances.

The viewer immediately senses that McAllister's hunch to follow Peter rather than pursue his earlier, more sociological notion is the richer path. McAllister stumbled upon a telling family drama: Peter's daughter supports Hussein, and she adamantly disagrees with her father, an unabashed admirer of America in a place where being tagged as a Western collaborator invites death. There is a world of commentary, as well as human interest, in the impatient sighs of their arguments.

"In the evenings I'd sit and have a drink," McAllister said of the hotel where Peter had a room in the basement and would occasionally perform. "The tendency is for these people just to appear," he said. "That's what I've learned. Instead of going out to Falluja to find a story, it's right there, really."

© Sukhdev Sandhu / The Telegraph / December 14, 2002 →

Films about asylum-seekers involve us looking at the world through their eyes, and in doing so, we're granted a unique perspective. Alert to the possibilities of being conned and exploited, and the need to get ahead at all times, the asylum-seeker is all eyes and ears, forced to be attentive to the shifting landscapes he traverses. Like the children in Iranian films, whose unique perspective on society he shares (both are margin-walkers - between innocent youth and canny adulthood, and between reviled foreign-ness and belated acceptance), he is alive to newness, possibility, awe.

The clash between new and old versions of Englishness lies at the heart of Hull's Angel, recently screened at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival and soon to be broadcast on Channel 4. It's a portrait of a remarkable 48-year-old woman called Tina, droll and resilient and passionate, who volunteered to help the 1,500 Iraqi Kurds relocated to a run-down part of Hull in September 2000.

They were met with indifference at best, more often unstinting hostility. Tina says: "Saddam kills you instantly, and England kills you extremely slowly and painfully." Local youths, living in a town where few fishing-port jobs exist, take out their frustration on the newcomers. After Tina's daughter Nicola marries one of the refugees, she is treated as a collaborator.

Tina herself becomes a "mother" figure for the less than saintly Iraqis. She creates a family for them, and helps them to find work. The only jobs available are for unskilled labour at de-unionised factories that pay less than the minimum wage. Tina doesn't want to send the refugees there, but they have no other options. After losing her own job, nor does she: we see her forced to work shifts at a chicken slaughter factory.

Hull's Angel is aptly titled. It is both funny and moving, as you would expect from a director who has previously made documentaries for BBC2's sorely missed Modern Times strand. It starts out beady-eyed and objective, but ends up with McAllister trying to help his subject, in much the same dynamic of intervention and attraction that drew Tina to the refugees. By the close, Tina has grown weary of the abuse and ingratitude she has to face from locals and refugees alike, and reluctantly leaves for Bradford. "Like the asylum seekers, we've copped out and left," she says.

© Rich Mills, 2002 →

When I started thinking about this piece, I was originally just going to write about the evening out I had on Saturday (July 19th). I and others around me experienced the cultural diversity that Hull has to offer. A Zulu wedding, a Salsa Night in aid of Deaf Children, Déjà Vu at The Welly, my diverse bunch of mates My banging night out! However on Tuesday (July 22nd) night I watched 'Hull's Angel', a documentary made by Hull people about Hull people. It was the story of a woman from Hull who gave her time freely and willingly to help the recent additions to our ever-changing melting-pot of a city. Following her, and her daughter, (who I knew through my own work with this cities huddled masses, and political activism in Hull). We got a not altogether positive image of Hull from this piece of documentary film-making. In fact with scenes of 'Little Beirut' being a major focus of the film, it didn't look good for us here in Hull at all. The almost slum like squalor that the disparate remaining residents of that small enclave between Anlaby Road and Hessle Road, somewhere!

I sat and watched the documentary with my friends and family in stunned silence! Why? Because we suddenly realised we all live in a city trapped in a time-warp, resistant to the kind of changes that happened across the country's inner-cities generations ago. We are a multi-cultural country, simple as. Probably one of the most concentrated mixes of differing cultures from all over the world in this geographically tiny country, but with a big personality. We are the mongrel breed! Heinz 57, as they say, and proud of it. That is what makes Britain great, our diversity, and ability to handle change. We have a long history of being invaded, and the recent influx of refugees and asylum seekers is hardly an invasion party. Up until a few years ago, Hull was known as a 'White City', because that was the majority of the faces you'd see on the streets of Hull. Local born white working-class, that was the credentials of the majority of the city's residents once upon a time. But times they are a changin', now no-one is quite sure what it means to be from Hull. What is it that makes you want to describe yourself as an 'ully! It appears we must broaden our definition of what we regard as a fellow citizen in this city. As if we are to start excluding our most recently arrived residents, then surely we must also exclude other immigrants into the city who were not Hull born.

What do I tell my friends? Many of whom have lived here years, and can be found to slip into Hull-isms like naturals from time-to-time. They feel they are 100% Hull and proud, carrying the banner for Hull wherever they go. Do I now tell them they are all sadly mistaken, or in fact delusional, to think that they could ever proclaim themselves to be from Hull. A right only bestowed on those born within the sound of howling fishwives, and the smell of the Cocoa Mills. Yeah right! I can see them falling for that one. They'd tell me where I could stick that idea! And to some extent that is what would define them as being an adopted 'ully! It's an attitude, a way of seeing the world around us, and having a strong opinion about it. Everyone who is from Hull, or has claimed sanctuary here over the years have one element in common. Despite the ever growing diversity of this city, there is I feel a common trait that defines what is to be from Hull. We all have an opinion about the place good or bad Usually bad! However that is our right as citizens of Hull. We have a right to slag the place off, but woe betide anyone from outside who comes in and starts whinging about the place. As then they will meet the acid-tongue of an 'ully on the defensive.

© Dennis Harvey / Variety / October 23, 2000 →

With peace prospects in the Middle East looking more dire than ever, there's insight -- if no uplift -- to be gained from "Settlers," UK helmer Sean McAllister's absorbing portrait of two diametrically opposed individuals on the Palestinian and Israeli sides. Short feature merits wide play at fests and in broadcast docu slots.

McAllister met and began filming his subjects without any particular plan in mind, struck by their overlapping larger-than-life qualities as well as their irreconcilable political/religious stances.

Afro-Palestinian Ali (no surname is disclosed) spent 17 years in prison for planting an anti-Zionist bomb; now a middle-aged husband and father, his multilingual skills have made him an in-demand commentator for international news media. Brooklyn-raised Dov Shurin says he was a Hindu before converting to Orthodox Judaism. Still coming off as a bit of an acid-fried ex-hippie, riffing like Wolfman Jack on his radio show, he now lives with wife and children at a posh Jewish "settlement" in a traditionally Arab sector of Jerusalem. Both consider themselves "men of peace." Yet it's clear each holds dear nationalist ideologies that share no middle ground.

During pic's time frame of about a year, McAllister's separate-but-equal friendship with the two gets rocky: He struggles to help Ali pull out of an abrupt, lengthy, alcoholic depression, during which latter's wife leaves him. Meanwhile, wildman Dov grows paranoid and hostile, eventually pegging the filmmaker (an English Catholic, for what it's worth) as a "Jew-hater."

Helmer's evident fondness for his complex protags makes docu's first-person p.o.v. seem necessary rather than indulgent. His pained bewilderment at duo's twin freak-outs adds poignancy to a nonfiction character study whose metaphorical dimensions couldn't come any more ready-made.

Sharp digital-vid lensing tops a package that's at once vérité-loose and drum-tight, astutely edited by Oliver Huddleston.

© Kieron Corless / Time Out →

"Jerusalem is an intense place at the best of times. Tonight's documentary 'True Stories: Settlers' was filmed in the city over the course of the last year (Ed:1999) when tensions have been creeping up to boiling point.

The release of Palestinian prisoners, the Israeli government granting land to the Palestinians and the ongoing settlement of Jews in Arab Muslim areas formed the backdrop to director Sean McAllister's riveting exploration of the settlement issue through the eyes of a Palestinian, Ali, and an ultra-Orthodox Jew, Dov.

'The Middle East is usually dealt with in an academic way on TV,' explains McAllister. 'I wanted to focus in on common, human things that audiences here can relate to.'

The two subjects presented themselves to McAllister almost entirely by chance. First of all the director bumped into Ali, who'd spent 17 years in jail for planting a bomb. While the self-styled terrorist-turned-tour-guide is showing him round, the larger-than-life showman Dov popped up to insinuate himself into the filming process, just at the precise moment when McAllister was looking to counterbalance Ali's views. Ali and Dov are both fascinating characters in their own ways - the contrast between their lives and entrenched political opinions makes for a gripping dynamic."

© Martin Kramer / Middle East Quarterly / 2001 →

How can one escape the grip of the ever-present minders, and come away with something authentic? One answer: film them. This is precisely what BBC journalist Sean McAllister did in The Minders. McAllister was on assignment in Baghdad in early 1998 after Saddam had blocked the weapons inspections, awaiting the arrival of cruise missiles. When the crisis temporarily lifted (without missiles being dropped), McAllister decided to turn his camera on his two minders. The two portraits-in-miniature tell a fundamental truth about the sanctions: the further you are from the inner ruling circle, the more they pinch. One Iraqi hardly knows the meaning of a shortage and will happily treat you to an ice cream at your hotel. Another has to sell his furniture, his Andy Williams and Sinatra albums, and even his pin-ups of British football stars, just to eat.

'Ala' is a veteran ministry of information official: an affable bachelor, secure in his sinecure, a bit of a dandy, and a soft touch. Yes, he has known better days: before Iraq became a "rogue state," he traveled abroad (his photo album is full of Western "girl friends"), and he accompanied foreign dignitaries on their Baghdad visits (here he is with a Russian cosmonaut). What he calls his "golden days" are over, but he's weathering the sanctions just fine, thank you. Kifah, soulful and philosophical, is a part-time minder whom the ministry only taps when the foreign journalists swarm the Al-Rashid Hotel. He lives from hand to mouth, with his aged mother, in a house where everything not absolutely essential has been sold off.

Paradoxically, Kifah is a more persuasive representative of loss than the children supposedly irradiated by depleted uranium. He has spent the last decade, he says, "simply struggling to stay alive." He built no house, bought no car, married no woman, traveled nowhere. "This is my kingdom," he reflects, surveying his bare bedroom. People like Kifah-educated, eager for contact with the world, political outsiders-were supposed to put a brake on Saddam. Instead, the sanctions left them completely absorbed with daily survival. "Are you proud of your country?" McAllister asks. Kifah hesitates, "Should I be?" And then, "I think it's my duty." The sense of resignation that pervades Iraqi society could not be better summarized.

© Thomas Sutcliffe / The Independent / Jul 3, 1997 →

...This was most striking in Saturday night's programme Working for the Enemy, a film gifted with one of those characters who press on an inflamed social nerve. Kevin had been unemployed for 18 years and had no intention of surrendering that status, whatever the plans of the local social security office.

If Kev had been stupid or vicious, this wouldn't have been very illuminating, but he wasn't - he was talented (he drew striking pictures, which he filed with a care that belied his pose of renegade insouciance), as well as nimble-witted. The scene in which he sparred with a job-training officer was a comedy of mutual incomprehension in which the social Band-aid kept coming unstuck because Kev simply wouldn't accept that he was hurt.

In fact, his logic of non-collaboration was flawed - and I think, at heart, he knew it - but the film let you get close enough to see those doubts, particularly when his own sense of propriety was aroused by his girlfriend's drug-taking. I still don't buy the title's implicit pitch for thematic unity, but United Kingdom is, at least, establishing itself as a brand-name of quality.