One year after the fateful Kurdish uprising, Frontkine charts dissident Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya's secret return to Iraq to investigate rumors of an official extermination program aimed at the Kurds. Makiya travels from town to town, sifting through documents, audiotapes, and video footage kept for years by the Iraqi secret police and captured by the Kurds in the uprising. The records detail the horrifying scale of the Iraqi state's routine surveillance, torture, and murder.