500 Miles to Babylon, Screening

500 MILES TO BABYLON
directed by David Martinez and produced by Juliet Dervin

PROJECT NARRATIVE

500 Miles to Babylon is a one-hour documentary film currently in post-production about Iraq under U.S. occupation. Narrated by the filmmaker, using footage shot in Iraq during the past year threaded with graphically animated archival sequences to provide historic context, the film will address the current war not simply as a conflict over petroleum profits or a scheme to fill a company’s coffers, but as part of a larger American imperial project.
Through impromptu interviews, glimpses of daily life, still photographs, and footage of car-bombs, demonstrations, night-time graffiti artists, Sufi rituals, and the celebrations following Saddam’s capture, 500 Miles To Babylon will reveal the complex situation in contemporary Iraq through a personal lens. Far from being a simple anti-war movie, 500 Miles will attempt to illustrate the terrible complexity of a people brutalized by a dictatorship, and the catastrophic results when that system is changed overnight by shortsighted military means.
500 Miles is also the story of director David Martinez, an American independent filmmaker in Iraq, attempting to understand the country and its ever-changing situation. One chapter of the film will relate his experience in Fallujah where he temporarily abandoned his camera and was part of an ambulance crew fired on by U.S. snipers, only to be taken prisoner later by mujihadeen fighters in the same city.
Martinez first visited Iraq in Fall 2003. Then, he found that some people (though certainly not all!) were optimistic, if guardedly so, about the U.S. occupation. Their loathing of Saddam Hussein was greater than their skepticism of U.S. foreign policy.
However by April, when he returned, he found that the barometer had swung the other direction. Iraqis who had formerly been patient about the worsening problems in Iraq were now completely opposed to the American presence. A crucial threshold had been crossed, and this change will be part of the film’s trajectory.

WHY TALK ABOUT HISTORY?

The story of Iraq did not begin in February of 2003 when the United States embarked on its latest military venture in the region. Nor did it begin in 1990 with the first Gulf War. Iraq has been at the center of the Western colonial imagination since it was created as a nation at Versailles, France in 1919.
500 Miles, therefore, will use animated still photographs and archival video to illustrate the modern history of Iraq, its genesis as a British colonial project and the not-so-ironic way in which it has come once again, eighty-five years later, to be at the “ground zero of imperial ambitions.
A ‘rough cut of the film is anticipated for February of 2005.
En sh’allah.

http://www.graffitifilms.com

Sneak Preview ... this Friday Night
October 20th @ 8pm
Station 40, 3030B 16th near Mission and BART