![]() ![]() Uday was fond of using falaqua – with a baseball bat - on his soccer players when his team lost a game. One video, which is very hard to watch, shows what falaqua is: a soldier being beaten on his feet. Janabi says one of Uday's favorite tortures was falaqua. "There is no question I have seen him torturing people, laughing, enjoying this many times." He enjoyed torturing people," says Janabi. He had been a key player in Uday Hussein's inner circle for 15 years, serving as Uday's press secretary and editor of one of the newspapers he controlled.ĭespite the capture of Saddam, and the deaths last summer of Uday and Qusay, Janabi is still terrified by the Hussein family – and Uday in particular. "Why should I do this? I did this because I am afraid of him … Either I get out or maybe I had been killed."Ībbas al Janabi managed to avoid being killed by defecting to Great Britain. ![]() In independent movies you'll find better, more interesting and maybe amazing stories."I leave my country, I leave my family, everything I love in Iraq and to flee the country," says Janabi. For the government to support you, you have to fake some facts. No (political) party is paying you to put ideas in your story. "There is no propaganda," Daffar wrote in an e-mail interview from Baghdad. All seem to think independent film is one powerful way to do it. forces and once by insurgents.ĭanger notwithstanding, Daffar, his crew, Raskin and Tucker remain committed to creating a more complete portrayal of Iraq. And Daffar himself, writing in an e-mail interview, described being captured twice by U.S. A cameraman took a bullet in his hand during a street fight. Saad Fakher, an associate producer of Dreams of Sparrows, was killed during production (the film asserts he was shot by American troops). Their lives under constant threat, correspondents engage in "journalism by remote control" instead of reporting from the street, he said.īut Iraqi journalists and filmmakers are also at high risk. Some insurgents, he said, consider all Westerners enemies. One reason American outlets haven't gotten the whole story in Iraq, according to former war correspondent and Columbia University professor Tom Lansner, is that the country is especially perilous for outsiders. The vivid footage in Dreams is unnerving, in part because it reveals Iraq as a place that's far more dangerous, complex and difficult to fix than American media consumers are led to believe. Some long for the orderly days of Saddam's rule others survived torture at the hands of his regime. Some Iraqis place photos of President Bush in shrines others can barely contain their contempt for the American forces. The Iraqis sent editing instructions to the United States via e-mail and cell phone.ĭreams offers a multiplicity of voices. For Voices of Iraq, two former MTV producers circulated 150 digital video cameras to more than 2,000 Iraqis and then compiled the people's personal stories.Įvery few weeks, Daffar sent footage to the United States, where editors assembled rough sequences and posted them on the internet. Some approaches to filmmaking in Iraq are quite innovative. Raskin hopes projects like Dreams will help kick-start independent cinema in Iraq, a country that the digital filmmaking revolution thus far has passed over. And independent filmmaking, though illegal, has become increasingly viable. In neighboring Iran, a group of filmmakers, with funding from the government, has built a cinema that has created some of the most provocative and masterful movies of the past 20 years. psychological operations teams) and what he calls Faces of Death-style compilations of beheadings. He saw locally produced video CDs being sold on the streets - the most popular were Saddam Hussein propaganda films, Saddam satires (Raskin suspects that some are created by U.S. ![]() ![]() MOVIE ABOUT SADDAM HUSSEIN CAPTURE TV"Fallujah happens - it's good TV for a week, but then we don't see what happened in Fallujah after," Tucker wrote in an e-mail interview from the Iraq-Iran border, where he's now making a film about land mines.įilmmaking in Iraq hasn't emerged organically - Raskin said local film culture in Iraq is almost nonexistent. soldiers living in a bombed-out palace and trying to enforce peace on Baghdad's streets. For Gunner Palace (tag line: "some war stories will never make the nightly news"), Tucker spent two months following a group of U.S. ![]()
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