BAGHDAD — Simple pleasures are still elusive here, but on a lazy Friday afternoon — a day before the seventh anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq — about a dozen men went to the movies to watch their war.

Instead of popcorn, there were date-filled pastries. The movie was a bootleg DVD of “The Hurt Locker” bought for a dollar and projected from a laptop to a big screen.

The subject, for this audience, was visceral and personal.

“Whenever we went to work, or when we would travel, we would see Americans trying to defuse bombs,” said Zaher Karim, 29, who works as a cameraman. “We would see these devices, this robot, which the Iraqis nicknamed Hamodi.”

In a city of seven million people but very few working movie theaters, the men said it was the first public showing of the movie, the recent Oscar winner that depicts a unit of American soldiers racing through Baghdad and disposing of car bombs — with their own hands and robotically — and improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s.