Docu-drama planned on Baghdad's Green Zone

The British director of the acclaimed 9/11 film United 93 is to focus his unflinching eye for realism on Iraq with a docu-drama about the aftermath of the US-led invasion.

Paul Greengrass will film an adaptation of Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a first-hand account of life in Baghdad's heavily-fortified Green Zone, which housed the Coalition Provisional Authority and scores of US personnel. In the book, which was published last September, the journalist and former Baghdad bureau chief for The Washington Post describes how inept US bureaucrats mismanaged post-invasion rebuilding as the country continued to disintegrate outside the blast walls of their compound.

The film is likely to be equally scathing; Greengrass, 51, who has a reputation as a master of the docu-drama genre, is not known to pull his punches and apparently thrives on politically-sensitive subjects, having made films about the murder of Stephen Lawrence and Bloody Sunday.