It’s sounds a bit smug to describe anything pertaining to war as
“interesting,” but at the risk of discomfort, I’ll say that from a
media point of view, the war in Iraq has been interesting. The
current situation came about just as ordinary people were becoming
comfortable with creating their own forums for information and opinion,
from blogs to iMovies, and the result has been a bombardment of
documentary films concerning the situation in Iraq, with wild variation
in quality. The sheer number of these releases is exhausting, and at
this point, it takes a particularly unique perspective for an Iraq
documentary to be noticed.
It may seem unlikely that such a film has come from Vice—a
media empire (magazine, store, record label, etc.) both adored and
disparaged as a digest of hipster ephemera. It was, in fact, an article
that appeared in Vice‘s pages that became the impetus for one of
the most unique Iraq documentaries to date: Gideon Yago was documenting
the outbreak of the war for MTV News when he discovered Acrassicauda,
which claimed to be the only heavy metal band in Iraq. He profiled them
for Vice, which led to what is described in Heavy Metal in
Baghdad as “an obsession” on the part of the Vice crew, and the
film documents Vice cofounder Suroosh Alvi’s visits with the band
(along with co-director Eddy Moretti of Vice Films and the Spike
Jonze-affiliated vbs.tv) as the situation
in Iraq, and with it that of the band members, has worsened.
The familiarity of Firas Al-Lateef, Faisal Talal, Marwan Reyad, and
Tony Aziz is immediate; they are four young guys obsessed with American
metal, whose proficient English is peppered with “dude” and who want,
inevitably, what their American counterparts take for granted: the
ability to rehearse without having their practice space nailed by a
SCUD missile; to wear a band T-shirt without risking getting shot; to
be able to travel without facing prejudice for their nationality.
It seems a little unfair that these young men—a mere handful
among thousands of Iraqis who have fled a country that really looks
like the flames and skeletons that adorn metal album
covers—should be chosen for the sake of their musical preferences
to be adopted under Vice’s wing (the company has raised donations to
aid them in getting to Turkey from Syria), but this peculiarity will
also serve to draw audiences to one of the most intimate everyman
accounts to the greatest crisis of our generation.