Movie about another failed state noted

I don't think it has attracted as much critical attention as it deserves, but the recent Netflix movie Mosul, about the terrible fighting and danger in that city as a result of ISIS, is very good.  

An American made film but with Arabic/Iraqi dialogue (and without featuring one Western character), it's surprising to read that it's the first film directed by its writer Matthew Michael Carnahan.   I would guess he has a promising future. 

I also see that it was filmed mostly in Marrakesh.  (As with Extraction, it's sort of funny to imagine the residents of  a city being excited to see a big movie being made there, only to realise on viewing the final film that it was chosen to look a convincingly horrible dump of a place.)    I thought the opening drone shots of a destroyed city looked real though - perhaps Mosul itself?

Unfortunately, it's been in the news recently for all the wrong reasons:

There has been a continuing sense of unease and high alert from the stars and filmmakers behind Mosul, the Iraqi-language thriller based on the true tale of an Iraqi SWAT police squad that took to the streets to wipe out ISIS members to avenge the love ones that unit members lost at the hands of the terror organization. The film made a high-profile Thanksgiving debut on Netflix and became one of the most viewed movies on the site in Europe and the Middle East. Unfortunately with the film’s popularity, several of the stars of the film have seen their social media pages filled with unsettling threats of violence that purport to be coming from members and loyalists of the fractured ISIS organization.
 

Well worth watching.