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  • Recent Documentaries about the Iraq War
  • Jacqueline L. McGrath

In October 2006, I helped organize several panels at the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society (AFS) as part of my work for a task force focused on documenting how the Iraq war had affected traditional culture in the region. The task force sought to showcase the work and views of Iraqi artists and activists, including the world-renowned oud performer Rahim Al-Haj and Iraqi novelist Mahmoud Saeed. We also screened an independent film produced by the Iraq Eye Group called The Dreams of Sparrows (2005). While these programs served to make the voices and ideas of these artists central to the conference itself, it was the documentary screening that produced the greatest dialogue and most passionate responses, and the audience responses to The Dreams of Sparrows lead me to investigate several other films that have been directed or produced by Iraqi people.

The Dreams of Sparrows is a short, haunting pastiche of interviews, images, and events before and after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. During the course of filming, one of the members of the production crew was killed by U.S. soldiers because he failed to stop at a checkpoint. The film includes unedited images of stark violence and the raw emotional aftermath of these dreadful, mortal events.

The movie ends on a devastating note, and at the AFS showing people in the room wept and stared. Saeed, who watched from a chair in the middle of the room, stood and launched into a harangue about the U.S. occupation and the actions of those present in the room, asking us in attendance, “Why? Why? Why? Why are you doing this to us? Why are you in Iraq? Why can’t you stop it?” We stared at him, a roomful of cultural experts and highly educated citizens, unable to answer, confronted by this writer as though we were directly complicit in the war itself. A few tried, seeking to explain not their personal views (to a person, those in the room were antiwar) but their theories for why the occupation was so dreadfully inept and fatal for so many people. As everyone spoke, the repeated apologia these culture workers provided was, “I didn’t really know. I have not seen this stuff in the news. We don’t get to see this.” Saeed found no comfort in these responses. His voice rose, and I quelled my impulse to stifle him or intervene. He had survived torture at the hands of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard for publishing his novels in Turkey. He could handle a room full of guilty and defensive academics.

I was one of those guilty and defensive academics, of course, and despite my half-hearted efforts on this task force and some faint efforts to participate in teach-ins and antiwar protests over the years, I have managed to do little to mitigate my personal responsibility as a citizen of the United States for the impact of this war on individuals in Iraq and their culture. But I do what I can. We all do.

One task that I have set for myself since the day I screened that documentary to such surprising response is to analyze and publicize the few but, by and large, smart and affecting documentaries about the Iraq War. They number in the dozens now and range in points of view. They strive to document history as it is happening: documentaries are, as they say, an attempt at a first draft of history.

Without question, documentary film has gained extraordinary power in recent years. With the rise of video-sharing Web sites like [End Page 218] YouTube and independent distributors and production companies, such films have become more democratic, and this has vastly increased the extent to which they preserve and shape historical narratives about war. In particular, many recent documentaries about the Iraq war are shaped by filmmakers with complex identities and relationships to the events: Iraqi citizens and artists of various ethnic backgrounds, American soldiers, international activists, and so-called guerrilla journalists involved in the war itself to various degrees. These films illustrate from within complex and...

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