WHERE DID PEACE GO ?

During a French documentary festival in Marseille I saw this movie called Iraqi short films made by a young Argentinian guy. Beautiful explosions, cursing, music and suspense… this 93 minutes film has everything a film needs but was made editing videos found on the Internet. Both camps, the American army and their allies – as well as the several multinational militia gangs that are resisting the occupation – make a lot of videos designed to be distributed on the net . They will teach you how to place a bomb, show you some explosions, soldiers yelling because they are scared, funny musicals made out of boredom and Islamic fighters chanting Allah Akbar… many little fragments of the war. Editing them with little commentary except for some quotations by Dick Cheney, Robert Fisk, Mark Twain and the likes, Mauro Andrizzi manages to produce the most relevant documentary on the war. And since showing what is happening over there seems to be forbidden (you know what happened to Zoriah Miller, right ? ) we found this work quite handy. We asked him to tell us about the route he took into national imaginaries.

Vice : Why did you make a movie about the Iraq war ?

Mauro : I have been investigating the current situation in the Middle East from the 90s. When investigating about the second Iraq war I started wondering how to make a film about the war without money and just a tiny budget. It was almost an impossible question to answer. And finally I discovered all those images on the web, with the help of two Iraqi friends who live in Buenos Aires. They helped me with the translations and we searched a lot of sites, Iranian, Saudi…

How did you find the videos ?

First, I started researching on American pages like LiveLeak or Youtube but there the videos are posted for 3 days or 10 days and then are censured. So, with the help of some friends, I started to discover pages from the Middle East, some militant pages, Islamic pages.  There’s a lot of material posted there. Also very explicit images, snuff and gore… soldiers that have their face blown up by explosives or that are cruelly shoot at... A lot of it thought, is also censured by the government of those countries when they discover it. So I had to find the material and download it at the very moment I had found it. Then I made one final extension from all the videos. Some of them were really pixilated and almost impossible to watch. The picture of the film is really phantasmagorical because the image is really trashed.

All of these images were taken on the Internet ?

Not all of them. Maybe 20 % aren’t. I have a friend who works for CNN Latin America, in the archive. He illegally gave me some footage. So some videos are from TV. And I edited all the material, of course. Put some videos in black and white, muted some, or added some music. I also added some effects. I tried to create some suspense. Of course, the videos had some suspense from the beginning. We are watching some fragments of the war, we know that things are going to explode…There’s a kind of potential that you can use in these videos. Even if it seems strange to say that, this film is not only a political work. I tried to make it very poetical. It’s about war but at the same time it’s about peace. With all the text I added I tried to create a poetical atmosphere, making not only videos about explosions and people dying. Hoping this conflict ends as soon as possible.  

There’s a big difference between the way Iraqi and western images are made. How would you describe the main differences ?

One thing for the Iraqi side : those images don’t have a counter shot. It’s just one shot and there’s only one person filming with a camera. That’s the common thing. The people from the Iraqi resistance know what is going to happen. They have the control of the situation. They are hidden, sometimes hours before the attack. In a way they have the power. The American side, or the contractors… when they shoot these images they are trying to show the horror of the war. There is no joy in these images, it’s just pure horror. For me with these images they’re trying to explain to the rest of the world how much they want to stay out of the conflict. They express all the desolation of being in this horrible situation.

For the militants, they shoot everything with joy and happiness because they are liberating their country. They are also very happy because some of them – not all of them of course – are Islamic. For them dying for the Islamic cause is great. The rest of the fighters, it’s just the opposite. They don’t know what they are dying for. For them it’s a job to be a soldier. They are mercenary. They are there because they have a salary. In a way it’s unfair. Because most of the American soldiers are really poor people. They’re coming from the south of the United States. There’s a lot of people of South America who try to win the American citizenship fighting in this horrible war.  I don’t want to insist on the soldiers being mercenaries. I think that the main difference : for one side it’s pure joy because they are liberating their country. They’re obeying the Islamic law. For the other side, they are really horrified about what they are living. You can see all this in Brian De Palma’s movie, Redacted. The American soldiers have a necessity of shooting this war to show to the world what is happening in Iraq.

It’s really complicated for the US army that their soldiers are doing these films. As I told you these videos are on the Internet maybe three four days. And maybe after a week or a month you can see them again. But they will censure them again. It’s a cycle with no end and that’s the good thing about Internet : everybody can host what they want.

Does the US army know that you’re using these videos ?

I really don’t think so, not at this very moment. I still didn’t screen it in the United States. The first time was at the FID in Marseille. The first time in the States is going to be on San Francisco next year. So maybe they will know... (he laughs) Anyway, I’m not afraid because everything that is on the Internet is for public domain. No… I’m not afraid.

Are you protected by the fact that you found it on the Internet ?

There is a lot of people who know about those videos. Some of them have maybe one hundred and thousands clicks. It’s not something dark and obscure that I discovered. I just found some videos and I made a special edition of them to address my political opinion about the war. But the films are on the Internet and you can’t deny it. Thanks to the Internet and to the blogs and to the web pages, and to all kinds of way of communicating that exist now, for all the sides implicated in this conflict, the Iraqi side, the American side.  Maybe the most problematic thing that I found making this documentary is that the Iraqi people are not shooting any kind of videos about their everyday life. And they are taking the worst part of the war, as in any war. So I really wanted to find videos filmed by civilians. But there is nothing about it on the Internet. I’m totally sure because I made a very extensive research with some friends that are really good with the Internet, with people who understand Arabic. Civilians just want peace and a democratic government. They have blogs and everything. But in these blogs you just have words, and sometimes an image is more important than a thousands words.

How did it feel having to organize real raw material ?

It was hard because every time you are watching most of the people you’re watching in the video are already dead. You are watching ghosts. For example, there is this video with an Islamic fighter singing a song called "Nasheed", some kind of Islamic anthem. He died like… three months ago. He was a kamikaze. You want to create emotion or suspense or make people cry. At the very beginning I was thinking about my ethics but  at the end, after one month I was trying to address my political point of view. I made a movie about war but also about peace. For me if a lot of people watch this documentary they will think about the horrors of war and will try to do something for peace. Some videos maybe you can find funny, like the British troops dancing on the song Is this the way to Amarillo ? Or maybe the American video with Electric Avenue song. But to shoot a musical during a horrible war is also pretty weird. I understand that the soldiers are under a lot of pressure and they need to do that kind of things to have less pressure but for me it’s the same horror than a explosion where 20 people die.

I can’t deny I manipulated the material. I used the musicals to ease the tension because most of the images are so cruel that most of the people have trouble watching. I repeated the explosions… Behind this horror there is some kind of fiction. Two words are colliding in this war. In one, people are dying and being kidnapped and everything. On the other side there is the fictional world that the Occidental secret services in the Middle East, like the Pakistan secret service are trying to impose to the media. They operate to all the rest of the world. Al Qaida is a good example. Now everybody knows that Al Qaida is an abstraction, it doesn’t exist. It’s a big lie. The official version about who is making these things is a big lie. The American soldiers have a necessity of shooting this war to show to the world what is happening in Iraq, like in Redacted.

Did you like it ?

Yes, very much. And a journalist from Les Cahiers du cinéma told me that the first intention of Brian De Palma was to make a movie like mine. Most of the people were not really interested when they saw Redacted. But I found it really clever anyway. The original versions of the videos that he used can be found on the web, the original ones, with people dying. He had to reshoot what he saw on the Internet. I thought at the very beginning of this project to do something like that. But doing it here in Argentina it could have looked funny. I think it’s a really good idea.

Have you been planning to make a new movie ?

A fiction film in Ciudad del Este, in the triple frontier of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. There's Hezbollah activity probed in there, so I want to use that and the fact that the city looks pretty much as Lebanon to portrait two colliding worlds: the real one, a the fictional one that Occident imposed via the media to the situation in the middle east since the early 90's. Shooting starts in January, I hope.

VALERIA COSTA-KOSTRITSKY