In a makeshift cemetery in Iraq, one group of men diligently chips away at rock-hard dirt, carving out trenches. Another carries shrouded bodies and lays them down for burial.
Jagged pieces of slate, with lettering in chalk, serve as gravestones. "A big man with a blue robe and a set of keys," reads one -- some of the dead haven't been identified.
You won't see this moving, vivid and revealing footage -- shot after the U.S. attack on Fallujah last November -- on your evening news. The scenes come from The Dreams of Sparrows, one of several recent documentaries about the war in Iraq.
Shot by a team of Iraqi filmmakers, Dreams is part of an independent, digitally enabled new wave of war reportage. Along with bloggers and independent journalists, Iraq-based filmmakers are transmitting stories they believe have been neglected by mainstream media outlets.
"Americans are missing a lot," said Aaron Raskin, the U.S.-based producer of Dreams who spent a month filming in Iraq.
In contrast to the short clips produced for the nightly news, independent journalists, filmmakers and bloggers tell long-form stories using consumer video and still cameras, computers and the internet, resulting in films like Dreams and Gunner Palace, by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein.
For Gunner Palace (tag line: "some war stories will never make the nightly news"), Tucker spent two months following a group of U.S. soldiers living in a bombed-out palace and trying to enforce peace on Baghdad's streets.
"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.
Filmmaking in Iraq hasn't emerged organically -- Raskin said local film culture in Iraq is almost nonexistent. 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. psychological operations teams) and what he calls Faces of Death-style compilations of beheadings.
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. And independent filmmaking , though illegal, has become increasingly viable.
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.
Some approaches to filmmaking in Iraq are quite innovative. 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.
Dreams was produced by a collective of Baghdad-based producers created by Raskin and Baghdad photographer Hayder Mousa Daffar. Daffar's team took digital video cameras to the streets and to sites including an institution for the criminally insane and a home for orphaned boys.
Every few weeks, Daffar sent footage to the United States, where editors assembled rough sequences and posted them on the internet. The Iraqis sent editing instructions to the United States via e-mail and cell phone.
Dreams offers a multiplicity of voices. Some Iraqis place photos of President Bush in shrines; others can barely contain their contempt for the American forces. Some long for the orderly days of Saddam's rule; others survived torture at the hands of his regime.
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.
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. Some insurgents, he said, consider all Westerners enemies. Their lives under constant threat, correspondents engage in "journalism by remote control" instead of reporting from the street, he said.
But Iraqi journalists and filmmakers are also at high risk. Saad Fakher, an associate producer of Dreams of Sparrows, was killed during production (the film asserts he was shot by American troops). A cameraman took a bullet in his hand during a street fight. And Daffar himself, writing in an e-mail interview, described being captured twice by U.S. forces and once by insurgents.
Danger notwithstanding, Daffar, his crew, Raskin and Tucker remain committed to creating a more complete portrayal of Iraq. All seem to think independent film is one powerful way to do it.
"There is no propaganda," Daffar wrote in an e-mail interview from Baghdad. "It's like a heart-to-heart. No (political) party is paying you to put ideas in your story. For the government to support you, you have to fake some facts. In independent movies you'll find better, more interesting and maybe amazing stories."
