Jeff Jacoby (via lgf) on the documentary “Voices of Iraq”:
Last spring, three enterprising Americans — filmmakers Eric Manes and Martin Kunert, both former producers for MTV, and Gulf War veteran Archie Drury, a former Marine…..distributed 150 digital video recorders to ordinary Iraqis and asked them to film anyone or anything they thought important — and then pass the cameras on to someone else.
From April to September, the cameras circulated from hand to hand through every region of the country. What eventually came back to the three Americans was 450 hours of raw video recorded by more than 2,000 Iraqis from all walks of life — and not one frame of it influenced by an outside director or crew. Edited down to a taut 80 minutes, the result — “Voices of Iraq” — is a gripping documentary that for the first time shows Iraq as even the most skillful American journalist will never be able to show it: through the eyes and ears of Iraq’s people.
“Voices of Iraq” is by turns heartbreaking, exhilarating, and inspiring. The war and its destruction is never far from the surface. One of the opening scenes is of a car bombing in Sadr City, and when a little girl is asked by her off-camera interviewer, “What do you want to tell the world about Iraq?” she answers poignantly: “These explosions are hurting everyone.” A mother weeps for her son, killed in the crossfire during a fight between US soldiers and looters. There is even footage — supplied, Drury told NPR, by a sheik from Fallujah — of insurgents preparing a bomb.
But bad as the war is, the horror it ended — Saddam Hussein’s 24-year reign — was worse.
In the film, a young Kurdish mother tells her daughter, who is wielding the camcorder, how she would burn herself with cigarettes to prepare for the torture she knew was coming. A policeman recalls what it was like to arrest a member of the Ba’ath Party. “You’d be scared,” he says. “You’d shake with fear.” One man explains that Saddam’s son Uday “used to come often to Ravad Street — every Thursday for the market — to choose a girl to rape.” A few brief clips are shown from a captured Fedayeen Saddam videotape: A blindfolded man thrown to his death from a rooftop, a man’s hand getting severed, someone’s tongue being cut out.
It isn’t hard to understand the emotions of the man who answers, when asked how he reacted to the news of Saddam’s capture, “I danced like this! I kept dancing. Then I cried.”
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