Synopsis
House of Saddam (2008) is a BBC/HBO four-part drama you can watch online on iFILM, covering Saddam Hussein's hold on power from the moment he moved into the Iraqi presidency in 1979 to the December 2003 night US troops pulled him out of a hole in the ground near Tikrit.
Igal Naor plays Saddam, Shohreh Aghdashloo his first wife Sajida. The series stays inside the palace rather than on the battlefield: his sons Uday and Qusay, cousins, advisors, and the women around him, all navigating a man who could reward and destroy in the same afternoon. The Iran war, the Kuwait invasion, years of sanctions all press in from outside; the drama lives in the rooms where loyalty has to be performed continuously and visibly.
Written by Alex Holmes from testimony gathered after the regime collapsed, the series is less interested in Saddam as a singular villain than in the system of fear that kept everyone around him complicit. Stream House of Saddam online on iFILM.
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