By Iain Blair 

I loved No End In Sight, but when Charles Ferguson decided to make it as his first film, the author and academic didn’t make it easy on himself. Instead of learning his craft and honing his skills with, say, an expose of corrupt florists, he jumped in the deep end by taking on the thorny subject of American policy in Iraq.

The result, the aptly-titled No End In Sight, was a feature-length documentary and an insider’s tale of the lethal mixture of incompetence, arrogance and blind ambition that catapulted the U.S. into an invasion with no exit strategy. Written, directed and produced by Ferguson, and executive-produced by Alex Gibney (whose Enron; The Smartest Guys in the Room was Oscar-nominated), No End In Sight doesn’t pull any punches as it combines raw footage from inside a decimated Iraq with interviews from such high ranking officials as former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, General Jay Garner and Ambassador Barbara Bodine to paint a grim picture of U.S. policy with regard to the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.

The film, which won the Documentary Special Jury Prize at the ‘07 Sundance Film Festival, was released theatrically and distributed by Magnolia Pictures. Now, in a sign of things to come, it will also be the first widely released feature film to screen in its entirety on YouTube starting on September 1 and continuing through the 2008 presidential election on Tuesday, November 4. The film will be featured on its own YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/noendinsight) and available to anyone with a computer and high-speed internet connection, as well as via the YouTube service on broadband-connected TiVo Series3 or TiVo HD DVRs, which enables subscribers to watch content of YouTube on their televisions.

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