If the gripping hand-held camerawork in The Hurt Locker kept you on the edge of your seat, then you’ve experienced the vision that Toronto-based Iraqi-Canadian Duraid Munajim brought to director Kathryn Bigelow’s remarkable film.

The Hurt Locker DOP Barry Ackroyd is nominated for an Oscar in cinematography; Munajim was one of two first unit camera operators on the picture and his specialty was the hand-held work.

‘I was hired as second unit camera, but when Katherine saw what I was doing, she moved me to first unit,’ the shy shooter says between gigs and festivals.

When we finally sat down for coffee in his home-base Toronto, he was en route to the competition in Sundance for Son of Babylon – a feature he DOP’d in war-torn Iraq in late ’08/early ’09 – which then goes straight to Berlin.

Son of Babylon ‘was a four-month shoot in Iraq, and this is the crazy part of it – it was a road movie, adding to the insanity – so we started north and then headed south down to Basra,’ he explains in perfect English, his third fluent language after Arabic and French. ‘My Farsi isn’t so good,’ he admits.

Filming a road-trip movie in a war zone might sound downright reckless – especially when Jordan stands in nicely for Iraq, as it did in The Hurt Locker – but Munajim went anyway. He’d finally met director Mohamed Al Daradji at a film fest in Sweden after several years of correspondence and felt compelled to hit the road.

In fact, Munajim’s life reads like an international copro. Born in Kuwait to an Iraqi father and an Iranian mother, the 37-year-old Canuck explains: ‘My parents immigrated here when I was 18,’ at the height of the Gulf War. He studied film at Concordia in Montreal before moving to Toronto, but his work in the Middle East is quite personal and the stories he’s lensed still resonate home.

Son of Babylon – a copro between Iraq, the U.K., France, Holland, Palestine, United Arab Emirates and Egypt – is about a young boy who follows his obstinate grandmother on a journey across Iraq as she searches to discover the fate of her missing son (the boy’s father), who never returned from the war.

And as virtually everyone knows, The Hurt Locker is a unique take on war, as seen through the eyes of an elite Army bomb-squad unit in a city where everyone is a potential enemy and every object could be a deadly bomb. Munajim scored the gig on Hurt Locker while shooting second unit on Brian De Palma’s Redacted in Jordan.

‘It was quite serendipitous actually,’ he says. ‘Redacted was a copro with [Toronto’s] The Film Farm, and while we were shooting the film, I heard the production manager of The Hurt Locker was in Amman,’ the capital of Jordan, so Munajim dropped by hoping to get another gig.

It is worth noting that the camera work and look is remarkably different in each of the three recent Iraqi stories Munajim shot.

‘Another specialty of mine is crazy time-lapse work,’ he adds, ‘and some of that was needed in Redacted.’ He attributes that gig to ‘a talented DOP called Jonathan Cliff,’ so one film indirectly led to the next.

But if you’re looking for more of his camerawork, check out Galafilm’s 10-part docu-series The Beat on Citytv, after the Olympics are over in B.C.

‘It’s about policing on Vancouver’s Eastside,’ says Munajim. ‘It’s so focused on the harshness of that part of the city, [Citytv] isn’t releasing it until after the Olympics, probably sometime in March.’

Shooting The Beat ‘was truly a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ shoot, which was a great privilege,’ he says, noting that the series is ‘all hand-held’ camera and underlining that he doesn’t want to be labeled as ‘the Canadian hand-held expert.’

Munajim has shot over 50 music videos, when ‘my specialty was green-screen work and making people look good,’ with talent such as Quebec director Maxime Giroux and Haitian-born rapper Wyclef Jean.