Originally published June 15 2005
Independent films capture the truth about Iraq
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Given all the media flops in Iraq, Wired News covers the individual efforts of filmmakers and photographers to tell the real story of war in Iraq.
In a makeshift cemetery in Iraq, one group of men diligently chips away at rock-hard dirt, carving out trenches.
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.
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.
Every few weeks, Daffar sent footage to the United States, where editors assembled rough sequences and posted them on the internet.
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.
Saad Fakher, an associate producer of Dreams of Sparrows, was killed during production (the film asserts he was shot by American troops).
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