FYI and also please share if you like, what the gist of this documentary looks like, to you?
best,
Dushawari
500 Miles To Babylon: A Film About Iraq Under U.S. Occupation
Thursday, April 17, 7:30pm, free
The Change You Want To See Gallery
84 Havemeyer St, at Metropolitan Ave
Brooklyn NY 11211
http://www.thechangeyouwanttosee.org
Please join us this Thursday for a screening of 500 Miles to Babylon, a film about Iraq under U.S. occupation. Filmmaker David Martinez will be on hand to discuss his experiences in Iraq. Sarah Husain, Organizing Coordinator at the War Resisters League’s Youth and Counter Militarism Project will discuss counter-recruitment campaign efforts in New York City.
ABOUT THE FILM: 500 Miles to Babylon is a one-hour documentary shot in multiple cities in Iraq in 2003-4. Narrated by the filmmaker, it addresses 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 charts the early days of the U.S. occupation as it blundered its way and Iraqi society began to collapse.
It is a film not about soldiers, not about governments, but about Iraqi civilians and a handful of independent journalists in a country being turned into hell. A cinema verite narrative of daily life, disintegration, and the humor that ordinary people adapt when living in a warzone.
The story ends with rare footage from inside besieged Fallujah, where the filmmaker went in April 2004 with a group of volunteers to deliver medical aid to the town’s inhabitants and subsequently reported to the world about the conditions of civilians during the fighting.
With a soundtrack of Iraqi Choubi songs compiled by Sublime Frequencies.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
David Martinez is a filmmaker and journalist originally from Texas, currently based in San Francisco. He is currently finishing, (along with co-producer Shane Bauer), a documentary entitled Songs To Enemies And Deserts about Darfuri rebel groups, filmed in Western Sudan in Summer 2007. His last project was a film called 500 Miles To Babylon about his experiences in Iraq, where he worked as a videographer in 2003-4. He contributed war footage to films like Fahrenheit 911 by Michael Moore and Iraq For Sale by Robert Greenwald. His reporting on social movements and conflicts has appeared in The San Francisco Bay Guardian, Filmmaker Magazine, CounterPunch, and Islam Online. He has worked in feature film production with directors John Sayles and Richard Linklater, and as an actor in the animated feature Waking Life, directed by Linklater. He has also been employed as a school teacher, social worker, bike messenger, and taxi driver.
ABOUT LOCAL COUNTER-RECRUITMENT CAMPAIGNS
The War Resisters League has been resisting war at home and war abroad since 1923. Today, as one of the leading radical voices in the antiwar movement, we challenge military recruitment and war profiteering, organize nonviolent direct action, and offer on-the-ground tools to end the current war and all wars.
The WRL’s Youth and Counter Militarism Project, based in New York City, provides young people with the resources and training necessary to agitate against military recruitment in their schools and communities. Our main focus is the Not Your Soldier Project. Our long term goal is to bring youth organizers and young veterans together to help build a unified, national anti-war movement. To help accomplish this, we produce materials, conduct trainings, and work in a number of national coalitions.