when the dust clears

This video is an assemblage of three clips from 2006 that we couldn’t fit into the doc.

The first two are segments of a tour Iraqi Army soldiers gave me of their quarters at 1/2 Charlie Company’s Firm Base 1.

Number three is a second scene from 1/2 Bravo’s encounter with the Anbari college student Omar. In this one, they discuss (American) popular music.

The grunts, IAs, and Omar are clearly consciousness of me and my camera. They perform, as many (all?) of us do when there’s a lens trained on us. This camera consciousness made me uncomfortable as I screened the videotape the first half dozen times, but I realized that such performances were as meaningful as the candid moments — or moments in which folks appeared to be unaware of the video camera but could very well have been calculating and acting.

The IAs direct their mordant jokes and complaints at me and through me to the presumed American audience. Omar and the boys of Bravo are ostensibly communicating among themselves, but they too are calibrating their statements for the “reporter guy” and the people in the U.S. who will see the video. There’s a heap of subtext the men dance around, under, and on top of — the issue of race springs to mind. This verbal shimmying and jiving is funny, ironic, absurd, poignant, and telling.

Agree? Disagree? Weigh in with a comment below!

AND: This will be my final prodding. Voting for Best of Doc 2011 ends in two days. Please cast your final digi-ballots for Full Disclosure!

This sequence, edited by Rachel Shuman and Adam Bolt, was built from footage I shot on one of the first patrols I videotaped. Of all the scenes we had to cut, I was saddest to lose this one. It captures, from a boots-in-the-mud perspective, the perpetual miscommunication between our troops and Iraqi civilians and the general absurdity of the mission.

First Battalion/Second Marine Regiment was nearing the end of its 2004-05 deployment to northern Babil province. Iraq’s first national election since Saddam Hussein’s toppling was two weeks away. Anti-US forces, particularly Sunni militant groups like Hizb al Awda and Ansar al Sunna, had promised violence. “This ain’t the fucking Republicans and Democrats,” Col. Ron Johnson, commander of 1/2′s parent unit, the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, remarked in his characteristically colorful style about the growing Sunni-Shia conflict during a briefing for me and two other journalists.

Days after 1/2 left Babil—and before the unit had even shipped out from Kuwait—a car bomb rocked Musayyib Hospital. Eighteen people were killed. The patrol base Bravo Company set up for the election had been next door, in the Musayyib Police Station.

Less than six months later, a suicide-bomb blast in Musayyib (also rendered as Mussayab or Mussaib) killed more than a 100 people, all Iraqi.

“I knew the spot, an intersection in the city’s center,” I wrote in a 2005 blog post. “I had walked or driven through it a dozen times with grunts… There’s a beautiful mosque right at the crossroads.” The bomb had been planted in a fuel tanker nearby. “The blast ignited the fuel inside the truck, turning what might have been a sadly typical tragedy into mass slaughter.

“In November 2005, bombers attacked the same mosque, killing 20 and wounding 64.”

And so on through the years: December 18, 2011: “A sticky bomb attached to a car exploded when the driver entered a bus terminal…”

I can’t say with any assurance what life is like in Musayyib now. Just as it was in 2005, finding stories about the city (in English) that aren’t about violence and death is very difficult.

I’m breathing many sighs of relief after my screening last night at the Frontline Club here in London. Judging from the facial expressions of the viewers I peeked at during the film—eyes wide open, hands covering eyes—people were engaged. The Q&A, which included the director and protagonist of the documentary that preceded mine, was one of the best in my yearlong film festival saga.

I am not a fan of double bills. Often the pairing is random or pretty damn close. My biggest fear, of course, is, What if the other film is better? But there are many others: What if my doc is scheduled to screen second and the first one sucks? I’ll lose half the audience. What if, what if, what if….

Last night, I had a bellyful of fear bubbling away because Full Disclosure was up second on such a bill. Screening first was Beneath the Sky, a 38-minute doc about war videographer Sulejman Mulaomerovic, directed by Bosnian filmmaker Ismet Lisica. Watching it, I realized that the pairing was inspired.

Lisica built the film around gritty, graphic footage Mulaomerovic shot during the Bosnian war. It’s more a collage than a straight narrative. Interviews with people Mulaomerovic encountered during the war provide milestones throughout the journey on which Lisica takes us. Mulaomerovic submits to a couple of awkward interviews. He shifts from foot to foot, stares at the ground—Mulaomerovic makes it clear he belongs behind the camera. Lisica also introduces us to surgeons who performed countless operations on wounded civilians, journalists who worked with Mulaomerovic, a lawyer who became a soldier who then became a lawyer again after the war, and so many others. But the doc devotes most of its time to the ordinary citizens under fire Mulaomerovic lived with. Soldiers, fighters, generals, snipers—this is not their movie.

Mulaomerovic was in the audience and participated in the Q&A. For a journalist who has seen and lived so much carnage—one doctor in the film talks about stuffing Mulaomerovic’s entrails back into his gut after he got torn up by shrapnel—he is stunningly warm, funny, and quite huggy. When he speaks, he speaks of humanity, of the survivors, their struggles and their attempts to knit their lives back together after the killing stopped.

Full Disclosure is primarily about marines. The nature of embedding limited my contact with ordinary people, but it allowed me to accomplish what I set out to: document what US troops were doing in my name. What I witnessed was, as I have said before, a tragic improvisation enacted on a daily basis. Heavily armed young marines, untrained and unprepared for an amorphous mission, wandered across an alien landscape and through an abused population hunting for invisible enemies. I tried to represent these young men as individuals. I liked many of the men, respected many of them, but what mattered in the context of the occupation—and Full Disclosure—is their life-changing, life-taking power over Iraqi civilians. They were instruments of American policy, and that is what I show.

The focus of our docs is different, but I think the spirit of the filmmakers and the BTS protagonist Mulaomerovic is similar. In response to a question about bravery, Mulaomerovic avoided fluffing himself up and spoke, at length —his translator called him beautifully verbose—about the importance of witnessing. It is the daily process of climbing a hill that never ends. The point isn’t to reach the top but to record everything on the way. He needed to show, to gather essential images—so essential that they’re being used in the Hague trials of alleged war criminals, Lisica told the audience.

I volunteered some of my own motivations for going to Iraq: a sense of responsibility as a citizen and journalist and, I admitted, a secret vanity. During my career as a journalist I had absorbed the message that real reporters cover wars. I hadn’t. But the first death I witnessed amplified the former feeling and erased the latter. Rage filled the gap, rage at the everyday senselessness and casual brutality of the occupation, and a virulent anger at the policymakers who unleash the disease of war—of choice, not defense— yet remain insulated from it. They inoculate themselves with the rhetoric of national security, national interest, nation-building, WMDs, or whatever floats on a given day and send others to die. Although I had a faint, vain hope that I could influence the debate about the occupation—silly after a certain point because there wasn’t one—simply making a record for history of what I witnessed kept me moving.

Ever the photographer, Sulejman—no longer Mulaomerovic to me—rounded me, his producers, festival director Patrick Hazard, who skillfully piloted the Q&A, and anyone who didn’t escape his grasp and posed us in various combinations. Then everyone retired to the bar.

I dashed out of the club to catch a train and passed Sulejman downstairs. He hugged me one last time, then invited me and my partner to Sarajevo.

The London International Documentary Festival enters its eighth day. I enter my third.

After a mixup with dates, Full Disclosure screens tonight with Beneath the Sky at the Frontline Club, a center for international journalists just north of Hyde Park.

Soho, May 19, 2011

LIDF is more a collection of screenings sprinkled across this sprawling city than a conventional festival with a single hub—a filmmaker’s lounge or main screening venue—around which everything spins. For that reason, it feels as if there’s no there here—until one arrives at an event.

Last night, Elisa Mantin screened In the Shadows of Death, a doc about Roberto Saviano, the crusading Italian reporter who exposed the workings and lucrative business affairs of the Camorra, the Naples’s mob. A heavy-hitting panel discussion followed—two UK and one Italian journo who specialize in organized crime plus an Italian criminologist at Oxford. The moderator invited filmmaker Mantin up about a third of the way through. All of the panelists knew or have met Saviano, who now lives in a bubble of bodyguards and safehouses because of Camorra death threats. This is not a Salman Rushdie situation where his fatwa can be negotiated away, they say. The Camorra never forgets, so Saviano will be a target forever, unless something miraculous happens.

In the Shadows of Death screening, Courthouse Hotel, London, May 19, 2011

In the Shadows of Death director Elisa Mantin and Oxford criminology professor Federico Varese

The night before, Eva Weber and Marc Isaacs spoke and showed clips from their rather provocative docs. Isaacs presented bits of City of Men and The Lift, for which he stood in one elevator for hours at a time and interviewed the people who got on. His work is uncomfortably direct; his approach to people clinical. In the same affectless voice, Isaacs poses an apparently random (though probably not in actuality) series of questions, from the utterly mundane to the existential.

Weber showed sections of The Solitary Life of Cranes, which is about heavy crane operators, not birds, and Steel Homes, which features video of people rummaging through items in storage lockers with audio from conversations with the locker renters. Cranes, which is brilliantly shot from these enormous mechanical structures that tower over London, has a wonderfully meditative quality. Like Isaacs, we hear subjects reflecting on issues small and the great. There’s no issue, concern, or point driving the doc. Weber also showed chunks of The Intimacy of Strangers, which is constructed from surreptitiously recorded cell phone conversations. Voices don’t necessarily connect to the person we see on screen, a device Weber says she uses in most of her docs.

More to follow after tonight.

Reporter Martin Evans spent quality time at the show earlier this week. He wrote a piece for the paper (PDF below) and another one for his blog, http://mcevans82.wordpress.com/

The work—photos, video, and text—is up at Adelphi University until Sunday, so please drop in if you’re in the neighborhood. I’ll also be there March 29 for an artist talk.

BP

I returned from Anchorage this weekend jet-lagged six ways to Sunday—and it was only Saturday—but also thrilled by the reception I got at the festival, in town, all over.

The second screening drew a good crowd on a snowy Friday night—young folk, not-so-young folk, several veterans, and other filmmakers. Christina Yao, Erik Knudsen, Elias Matar, plus Robert Crosby and his director of photography Diego Madrigal, and others showed up. The Q&A was as intense (and longer) than at the December 5 screening.

Some great news followed me home: Full Disclosure won Honorable Mention in the Documentary and Audience Choice Award competitions. There were loads of folks pushing for me, among them the tireless festival blogger/University of Alaska–Anchorage professor emeritus Steve Aufrecht; Shannyn Moore, who interviewed me on her TV show Moore Up North and her eponymous radio show within in a 24-hour time span; and Moore’s producer/partner Kelly Walters. Heaps of thanks to the judges and audience members.

Taping of Moore Up North, The Taproot, December 9, 2010

For those in Anchorage (and even Wasilla) who missed it, Full Disclosure screens again in the Best of the Fest, Tuesday at 8PM, at the Bear Tooth.

I saw a white plastic sign outside the Anchorage Museum a couple of days ago: Ten buses a day to Wasilla. I thought, Why not tomorrow? I’ll daytrip out there, poke around, snap a photo of myself in front of City Hall or some such place to prove I was there, then head home. Alaskans warned me that the town is pretty much a “strip mall with a highway running through it,” but I figured, when’s the next time I’m going to be here, so close to the spawning ground of That Former Alaska Governor Turned Ubiquitous Media Phenom?

That night I was invited to dinner by Eden, the sister of a friend I haven’t seen in nearly two decades, Lee. (Facebook provided the connection.) Her husband Steve cooked us a great meal—crab cake appetizer and fajitas in abundance. We talked as Eden washed the dishes. Steve recounted how recently a TSA agent inspecting his driver’s license at an airport security checkpoint outside Alaska asked, “Can you see Russia from your house?” Steve said he’d heard these tired references to Herself so many times before. He shook his head. “Nobody asks us about the mountains anymore,” Eden said. “Or the fish. Or the bears.”

Food for thought on top of a lovely dinner.

Yesterday, the organizers of the film festival piled a half dozen of us filmmakers in a van, Taavi from Estonia and Erik from the UK among us, for a field trip of a different sort.

You couldn’t call what we did “hiking” in the truest sense—we trudged around in the snow in the shadow of Flat Top Mountain for only an hour or so. Film festival general manager Dawnell walked us to a lookout point below which Anchorage sprawls, with Denali and other peaks in the Alaska Range in the distance. There was a slight haze over the mountains, but everything else was clear. Stunning and humbling. From where I stood, I could see Alaska.

No Wasilla on this trip.

Remnants of my last root beer before tonight's screening

A full house at the Out North Theater for Full Disclosure, a wonderful surprise, and a first. Judging from the intensity of the Q&A—direct and probing questions plus some heartfelt testimony—audience response was good.  If Friday goes 72% as well, I’ll be thrilled. Now, it’s time for me to see some movies and a little bit more of Anchorage and its environs.