The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife, Part 1

Dokumentär från -91 av den berömde dokumentärfilmaren Nick Broomfield. Med sitt karaktäristiska gonzo-manér är han är på jakt efter en intervju med Eugène Terre’Blanche, grundare och ledare av den rasistiska och högerextrema organisationen AWB, som har som mål att upprätta en Boer-republik i Sydafrika.

Terre’Blanche undviker och bryter alla överenskommelser om möten, vilket får Nick att skifta fokuset mot Ledaren chaufför och hans fru, innan han äntligen får sin sit-down. Effekten av kringrörelsen blir att porträttet av AWB och dess ledare blir både tydligare och mer tragikomiskt än vad annars hade varit fallet. Filmen ger på så sätt en unik bild av apartheidregimens sönderfall från insidan.

A Time Comes
Dull documentary-cum-corporate-video about the Greenpeace Kingsnorth climate change protesters, with talking head segments directed by Nick Broomfield.

Better Off Dead
Another Savage Steve Holland coming-of-age teen comedy with John Cusack stuck in American suburbia.

Oxford Blues
Really rather terrible retooling of A Yank At Oxford, with Vegas valet Rob Lowe stalking Princess Diana-type Amanda Pays to Oxford University, where he learns Important Lessons about Being A Team Player, and falls for fellow rowing club member Ally Sheedy. Grim.

Von Ryan’s Express
Ol’ Blue Eyes takes on Thee Nazis in steam train/POW escape hybrid.

The Bourne Supremacy
Matt Damon returns as amnesiac superagent Jason Bourne, with documentary/verité specialist Paul Greengrass taking over direction.

Some great sequences – the escape from custody at Naples airport; the fight in the Munich apartment of Treadstone operative Jarda; the extended Moscow car chase. Brian Cox is a welcome addition tot he rep company, as shady CIA boss Abbott.

The Bourne Ultimatum
More Bourneness, again directed with vim by Paul Greengrass.

Paddy Considine is not well cast as a Guardian journalist caught up in the Treadstone treadmill, but the extraordinary rendition sequences around Waterloo Station are superb, as is the Tangier rooftop foot pursuit.

Two Mules For Sister Sara
Not the best Eastwood/Siegel Western, but watchable. Shirley Maclaine is a nun who ain’t all she seems, and there’s Mexican revolutionaries and stuff

Documentarian Nick Broomfield has produced this great little film about Greenpeace’s Kingsnorth protest. It’s a remarkable story, for the achievement itself and for the court case – it was the first time climate change was used as a defence.

Marxism 2009 – A Festival of Resistance

CAPITALISM ISN’T WORKING…

COME AND DISCUSS THE ALTERNATIVE AT…

Marxism 2009 – a festival of resistance

Thursday 2nd – Monday 6th July 2009, central London

BOOK NOW TO GET £5 OFF YOU TICKET PRICE!

Online: http://www.marxismfestival.org.uk

Phone: 020 7819 1190

Over 1,000 people have already bought tickets for Marxism 2009. We are now entering the last full week of the £5 discount on Marxism tickets: get yours now at:  http://www.marxismfestival.org.uk or call us in the office on 020 7819 1190.

With the current £5 discount, prices are: Waged – £40, Unwaged – £27, HE student – £20, FE student – £10.

Remember, if you can’t afford to pay now but want to get the £5 discount you can register before 31st March and postdate your payment – just give us a call in the office: 020 7819 1190.

Highlights include:

* Alex Callinicos vs Slavoj Zizek – a debate on “What does it mean to be a revolutionary today?”

* David Harvey on Marx’s Capital and debating Chris Harman on “The crisis of neoliberalism”

* Tariq Ali on Pakistan’s deepening crisis

* Terry Eagleton on “Socialism and culture”

* Sheila Rowbotham discusses pioneering gay rights campaigner Edward Carpenter

* Gary Younge speaks on Obama’s rise to power

* Ghada Karmi participates in a course of meetings on Palestinian liberation

* Michael Billington and Sam West take part in a tribute to Harold Pinter

* Bernadette McAliskey speaks 40 years on from her election to parliament and the Battle of the Bogside

* John Bellamy Foster takes part in a course on “Marx and Darwin” and speaks on Marxist ecology

Other participants include: Tony Benn, Paul Gilroy, Eamonn McCann, Mark Serwotka, Sally Hunt, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Nick Broomfield, Michael Rosen, Istvan Meszaros, Roy Bailey and David Ferrard, Pat Devine, Danny Dorling, Zoe Williams, David Edgar, Haifa Zangana, Steven Rose, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Ben Fine, Ron Oppenheim and Natalie Adler, Jeremy Dear, Ludi Simpson, Leo Zeilig, Graham Turner, Chris Searle, Adam Tooze, Costas Lapavitsas, Omar Puente… and many more!

Courses and meetings include: Capital for beginners * The Marxist method * The economic crisis – causes, consequences and questions * Resistance and recession in Britain * The culture of crisis * The International Socialist tradition * 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet block – before, during and after * Islam and Islamism * Lenin and Leninism * Trotsky * Revolution and beyond * Racism, segregation and multiculturalism * British society today * The fight against fascism * Women’s liberation * LGBT rights * The US – then and now * China – from Mao to markets * Imperialism today and the “war on terror” * Pakistan * Voices from the Middle East * Palestine’s fight for freedom * Latin America * Africa * Climate Change – saving the planet * Darwin and Marx – evolution revolution * Education * Students and the struggle * Capitalism and the media

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

It’s already February! and I haven’t had time to reflect on the highs of 2008. But now is the time!

The good stuff of 2008.

A particular achievement was writing, producing and directing the short film ‘Jake Chaplin’, while also making my acting debut in the short ‘A Short Film About Jam’. Jake Chaplin was made as part of my Uni course, which I graduated from, earning a BA Hons in Media. Woohoo!

Traveling is something I really enjoy (when I have the money) and 2008 was a big year for seeing new places and experiencing new things. In May I traveled to Fort William and climbed the highest mountain in the UK, Ben Nevis, with my dad and my dog Che. It took around 5 hours, but it was worth the effort. The scenery is amazing and the sense of accomplishment isn’t too bad either.

For a summer holiday, Suzie and I traveled to Salou in Spain, taking in the sun, sea and sand, while going to one of the biggest theme parks in the world – Port Aventura. It was here I overcame my fear of falling by going on a drop zone ride (basically a seat which travels to the top of a very high pillar before releasing and free-falling to the bottom – aaaaahhh!). Not long after this we went to Alton Towers for the weekend, love the shows and would have to say the Rita is my favorite, so fast.While in Spain we went to Barcelona for the day, visiting the Nu Camp, the Sagrada Familia and taking in other Gaudi architecture.

I also traveled to Bolton and Manchester to see Amir Khan fight along with Alex Arthur who shared the bill in Manchester. It was good to see Khan getting knocked out by Breidis Prescott and it’s cool to say you were there. Shame Arthur got beaten though. I saw Paul Burns (Gaz’s pal) fighting for the first time in Motherwell Civic, he won on points and dominated the fight. I couldn’t afford to go to Vegas for the Calzaghe fights.

While on sports, in 2008 I saw Celtic take on their Old Firm rivals at Celtic Park back to back. The two home games in a row were phenomenal as we won both and secured another league championship.

I like my music and 2008 was a busy year for gigs. Highlights include seeing Neil Young at the Edinburgh Playhouse which was something special. I like my indie rock n roll so Babyshambles at the Barras and Dirty Pretty Things at ABC were pretty good too. Plus all the Rockburn gigs. I went to T in the Park (5^th time) where The Verve, The Pogues and Kings of Leon were among the highlights. While we’re on the subject I also went along to see Thriller Live! with Suzie and her family and she came along to see a Johnny Cash tribute with me and mine. The contrast.  

For those of you who are still reading this, a final highlight of 2008 was meeting documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield, who gave a master class on directing documentaries. I’m a big fan of his work so it was pretty cool to have him teach me. I was also fortunate enough to meet Quentin Tarantino in Glasgow’s Virgin. He was over promoting Death Proof, which I later saw on the double bill with Planet Terror. Not long after I went to see cult filmmaker David Lynch talk about meditation at the GFT. I wasn’t too interested in spiritual enlightenment, or the process he was preaching, but he spoke a bit about his films and his career so it was all good.

As for films, being a media student I watched over 150 films last year – top ones are No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood, Nobody Knows, Infernal Affairs, Time Code, Presepolis and The Lives of Others. I also read over 30 books last year – top ones being Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, A Farewell to Arm by Ernest Hemingway, Down and Dirty Pictures by Peter Biskind, War Fever by J.G.Ballard and the poem The Wasteland by T.S. Elliot (I know its not a book, but it’s worth a read).

2009 has already begun…

www.edfringe.com – Edinburgh Fringe festival

www.palinstravels.co.uk – Michael palin ex monty python now travel documentary writer

www.flickr.com/photos/dgbalancesrocks – Flikr site for Dave Gorman

www.louis-theroux.co.uk – Fan site to media Journalist Louis Theroux
gormano.blogspot.com/ – Personal blog for Dave Gorman
www.artsplosion.blogspot.com/ – Austin based artist Mark Pedini
www.citizensrequired.com/unit/site/index.shtml – Site for media Journalist Danny Wallace,championing his project in which he starts his own country.

Martin Bashir – http://www.nndb.com/people/498/000044366/

David Attenborough – http://www.davidattenborough.co.uk/

Nick Broomfield – http://www.channel4.com/more4/event/B/broomfield.html, http://www.channel4.com/more4/documentaries/doc-list.jsp

I’m anxiously awaiting the delivery of my Nick Broomfield: Documenting Icons dvd box set. I think I’ve seen most of them, but I shall be very proud to have them all in a nice wee box. His Aileen documentaries are my favourite things to watch ever ever, my dvd will probably stop working soon it has been watched so many times. I’m not a fan of his Biggie and Tupac documentary though. Boring. Kurt and Courtney however is really good.

I currently have the dvd ‘Sid and Nancy’ on in the background. I was interested to see this after watching Nick Broomfields’ documentary ‘Kurt and Courtney’ and got to thinking about notorious pairings. I watch things like this, then decide who’s more to blame. Like Fred and Rose West. Hmmm well bad example, they were both equally to blame. But with Sid and Nancy. I’d say he’s more to blame. Kurt and Courtney, well I’d say she was more to blame. I have not very much clout behind my arguments at all you understand, it’s just a wee game I play to please my brain lol. Try it – who’s to blame – choose and discuss -

Hillary Clinton/Bill Clinton

Jordan/Peter Andre

Brad Pitt/Jennifer Aniston

You get the picture. Here’s a blog I read about – well the name says it all really lol – the Chelsea Hotel :

www.chelseahotelblog.com

I’d like to stay in it some day, just to say I have as it looks like a dead cool, bohemian place. We had our photos taken outside it when we were in New York last year. But it sounds like it’s days are numbered and it’s being gentrified as we speak. Such a shame, but the reality is that people would still flock to it anyway and money talks.

Kontroversiell film om hur absurt krig egentligen är.Vet inte hur det är med er egentligen, men jag tyckte att denna film kändes väldigt “anti” allting. Detta samtidigt som den försöker ge en rättvis bild från allas synvinklar.

Framförallt visar den en rättvis bild på vem som i slutändan förlorar på kriget, nämligen de oskyldiga som lever mitt i det.

Jag pratar alltså om “Nick Broomfield’s” ultra kontroversiella film “Battle for Haditha” som inte lämnar någon oberörd. En film som har fått väldigt lite uppmärksamhet men förtjänar all heder för att den har blivit gjord.

Filmen handlar om kriget i Irak sett från 3 olika håll och framför allt skillnaderna som uppstår mellan och i varje grupp. Amerikanska soldater som målas upp som adrenalinstinna stridspittar, samtidigt som vi får se de med samvetskval, terrorister som tror på sin sak bara för att inse vad det leder till och alla dessa oskyldiga människor och hur de lever i en såpass hård vardag att det förändrar dem fastän de kämpar för att behålla det “normala” i det hela.

Filmen i sig är realistisk och starkt porträtt filmat i en halv-dokumentärisk stil som absolut funkar, det ger det hela en slags äcklig realism över det hela, och jag var lite fundersam stundtals på om det var på riktigt eller inte. En annan sak som slog mig var att jag fick lite “Babel” vibbar av filmen, så uppskattar ni den typen av film så är detta en film för er.

“TV-Serien “Generation Kill” känns lite som ett modernt Band of Brothers men är i själva verket mer som en light version av vad Broomfield har lyckats fånga med denna film.”

Battle for Haditha: 8 av 10

Picks of the Week

Juno – The indie darling of this year that’s much better than the now-naysayers would like you to think. Any Juno backlash should be counteracted by a) Ellen Page’s amazing performance as well as the turns from Michael Cera, Allison Janney and JK Simmons, b) The whipsmart script that never gets too enamoured with itself, and c) the fact it features Cat Power singing ‘Sea of Love’ and Michael Cera and Ellen Page singing at each other at the close. Lovely.
AND…
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – Just the most moving and honest piece of cinema to be released over here this year. Julian Schnabel’s adaptation of Jean Dominique Bauby’s memoir written while suffering from locked-in syndrome is an astonishing achivement of acting, writing and cinematography. Also, Max von Sydow as Bauby’s father delivers the most crushingly emotional scene of the year and yet, never once is the film mawkish. Brilliance.

Also out:

Curb Your Enthusiam Season 6 – Still delivering great moments here and there but this one’s time has passed and the genius of the first three season broadened to create just a very good sitcom rather than a work of misanthropic art.
Cloverfield – I mentioned this last week but it is a decent little monster movie and worth a watch even if the cast bland it to the max.
The Edge of Heaven – Can’t wait to see this, Fatih Akin’s follow-up to Head On looks like just wonderful.
Dirty Harry Collection – Full box set of all the terrific Harry Callahan films including the truly masterful original.
Dan in Real Life – Decent if deeply unspectacular Steve Carell vehicle in which he is good despite having to share the screen with Dane Cook.
War Inc – No cinema release for this little one starring John Cusack and seemingly some sort of comment on the war-as-business debate. Looks pretty uninspired.
Jesus Camp – Excellent if one-sided portrayal of a Christian camp for young children that features some truly satisfyingly horrifying scenes for us atheists.
Battle for Haditha – Nick Broomfield’s outstanding semi-documentary piece on Iraq’s My Lai.
Tony Jaa 2 Pack – Ong Bak and Warrior King in one handy boxset for those days when all you want to do is watch someone kick someone else really, really hard. No plot but the kicking, oh, the kicking.

Region 1:

Jumper – Shitty, Hayden Christensen starrer saved fully in my book due to the presence of Rachel Bilson.
The Bucket List – Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman celebrate being old with hilarious/cringey results.

Battle of Haditha centres around true life events, when marines in the US army went on a rampage in a suburb of Haditha after falling victim to a roadside land mine. The marines kill 19 innocent Iraqis, some as young as 3 and as old as 76. For those of you who do not know who Nick Broomfield is, he is the director of Battle of Haditha and also the equally good, if not better, Ghosts (2006), about the 22 Chinese cockle pickers killed on Morecambe Bay.

Broomfield’s documentary style is a little controversial, he has deliberately chosen high profile events and changed some of the reality of the events. The result is a fact based drama, I think the reasoning for this shift is political.

Firstly, would Ghosts have made the same impact if it chose to approach the subject as a straight documentary? Can we get a sense of what it is like to work as a Chinese illegal immigrant, having to work up to 16 hours a day, with two jobs, below the minimum wage and shafted by landlords and agency firms for money? Would Broomfield have been able to even get close to the illegal shipping of persons from China, or the illegal employment of immigrants on destitute wages? The answer is a resounding no, as the this Guardian article puts it:

Would Ghosts have functioned just as successfully as a straight documentary? One can easily imagine Broomfield interviewing the Morecambe bay survivors and door-stepping the corrupt enforcers (Chinese and English) at their suburban homes. But perhaps that would have lacked the claustrophobic intensity of this fact-based fiction; the sense of being inside looking out, as opposed to the other way around.

The main bulk of Ghosts is based on the experiences of a female Chinese Guardian journalist, who worked undercover as an illegal immigrant to expose the trafficking of people from China, she ended up in Lowestoft (of all fucking places) as a farm labourer, unable to pay for the goods she produces from the local supermarket and living in squalid cramped conditions.

Eventually the immigrants end up in Morecambe picking cockles and it is here when political reality and the depiction of reality in films collided. While filming the crew and actors were subject of a violent racist attack by real English cockle pickers, Broomfield then used the filming of this attack in the film to draw attention to illegal labour being used by capitalism to sustain profits, while persecuting and sustaining racism towards that very minority. It is the only ‘real’ event to happen in this documentary about ‘reality’.

The same is used to similar effect in Battle of Haditha, the roadside bomb was planted by two Iraqi resistance members, while in reality, the roadside bomb was in fact a landmine. The portrayal of the two Iraqis gives Broomfield the opportunity to show the Iraqi resistance as ordinary human beings motivated by the violence of the oppressor and the occupation to commit acts of terrorism, while their leaders are still shown to be the Western caricature of Islamists, the ‘ordinary’ Iraqis drink, swear and aren’t good at their job. Both the soldiers and the resistance members (after their bomb provokes the massacre in Haditha) are shown to feel regret for their role.

It’s still far from the description of the resistance in the film by Louis Proyect as bloodthirsty militants, though this may be because he sees the resistance with rose-tinted spectacles. Proyect also argues that end scene where a soldier rescues a child is reminiscent not of reality but of some Hollywood movie, I agree more with this assertion from Proyect, humanism isn’t usually found in war, but at least it gave Broomfield the chance to paint the marines as being human and sickened by their actions.

So far from showing “innocent civilians being caught between the pincers of an occupying army and a bloodthirsty insurgency” Broomfield twists reality to show the true problem in Iraq, the occupation, and it is only when that changes, when things may return to some kind of normality.

Battle of Haditha has been used a number of times by the Stop the War Coalition to highlight the brutality of the occupation, 100 attended the screening at my college alone. His changing of reality is something that should be commended as bold and innovative, because it has allowed his more broader political ideas to be sketched.

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“It’s a filmmaker’s responsibility to put together something as accurate as possible,” is the Broomfield manifesto. Following 2006’s acclaimed Ghosts, he’s taken his experiments with ‘real cinema’ to a new level with Battle for Haditha – digging as deeply into the principles of filmmaking as he does the universal issues surrounding this symbolic episode.

“It’s great fun to play around with style,” Broomfield tells me, citing Day for Night – François Truffaut’s much-lauded film about making a film – as a creative influence. Certainly since the journalistic frustrations of 1988’s aptly-titled Driving Me Crazy, he’s carved a name for himself as a figurehead for what pigeonhole enthusiasts call les nouvelles egotistes: a growing breed of doc-makers who are themselves central to the action, together with the likes of Louis Theroux, Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock.

Given their deviation from this trademark approach, it’s all-too-tempting to pin up his two most recent films as the start of a new chapter in his work. Both are dramatic interpretations of controversial situations, with no bobbing boom or frantic chase in sight; unlike much of his personality-driven back-catalogue to-date, both stories pivot largely on a specific series of events and the complex repercussions for the many characters involved.

But like his intriguing Anglo-American drawl, or one of his elusive heckled interviewees of past films, Broomfield’s not that easy to box in: for him, both style and substance should remain organic. “I think about one project at a time; I never seem to have a problem finding my next film,” he insists. “I’m not one of these people with a list.”

The latest episode to pique his inquisitive instinct was the death of 24 Iraqi civilians in the small town of Haditha on 19 November 2005, in the aftermath of a blast from an improvised explosive device (IED) that killed a young marine riding in convoy. Whilst initial reports from the US military claimed that the deaths were a direct result of the blast and a subsequent gunfight with hostile insurgents, Iraqi witnesses told a very different story – five unarmed men in a taxi shot dead as they approached the scene, and 19 more killed in three nearby houses in an act of violent retribution over the following hours.

It was an amateur video clearly showing the bodies of women and children shot in their homes, passed to an Iraqi human-rights organisation and then to Time magazine, that laced the affair with doubt. It identified flaws in the marines’ statement, prompting a formal inquiry – although the initial conclusion was that it was collateral damage, things soon spiraled into a full criminal investigation, with several marines on trial for unpremeditated murder. For Broomfield, this was motivation enough to cement the blood-soaked incident as an example.

“I’ve researched lots of subjects that I haven’t followed through,” he admits. “When you’ve got to be with them for a year, a year-and-a-half, you might as well do something that is complicated enough, or has enough mystery to keep you going. I don’t like going into films knowing what the outcome will be: often it’s the discovery that’s exciting; changing your mind; meeting people with sides that you’d never imagined before. That’s what makes it worthwhile and fun.”

It’s a compelling approach: filmmaker both directing the action and being swept up in it. “It’s all to do with storytelling. Any way you can tell the story better so it’s more real, more entertaining, more contemporary, is great to play around with,” is Broomfield’s take. In the case of Battle for Haditha, this involved building a framework from what few indisputable facts were available – and letting the cast improvise the rest.

As with Ghosts – for which the painstaking research process including hiring Chinese students to pose as illegal immigrant workers, and posing as an Afrikaner worker himself to film the results with a hidden camera in his glasses – finding the right cast to carry the film was crucial. Not necessarily just for their acting skills, but for their genuine deep-rooted emotions, experiences and insider-knowledge that could steer both the general atmosphere and finer details more accurately than any stubborn director with a top-down vision.

Understandably, it feels like a documentary-maker’s approach to drama: letting the action unfold as naturalistically as possible. At first he considered going the full distance: tracking down the marines who had lived and breathed the sweat, smoke and blood of Haditha, and asking them to re-enact the events of 19th November 2005. But in the flesh, as he told The Times, they were “fucked up, much too jittery. Some couldn’t keep still when we were talking to them.”

One of the most shocking elements during this initial research period was the marines’ “distressing and vulgar” sense of humour; arguably a coping mechanism to detach them from the shocking things they’d seen and done, but something Broomfield had to fight through, alongside the jitters and the tranquilliser damage, to understand what they were really about.

Unable to work with those directly connected with Haditha – and with the trial just getting under way – the production favoured a more conventional call-out to casting agents with military connections, tapping into servicemen who had recently returned from active duty to keep that emotional resonance without jeopardising the whole project.

The highlight of their nine-month casting call was unearthing 22-year-old ex-marine and aspiring actor Elliot Ruiz, who at 17 had been the youngest solider deployed to Iraq, and had already had his personal story dramatised in a Pulitzer-nominated play. Corporal Ramirez wasn’t any easy first lead role for Ruiz: dredging up all manner of demons, it was a turbulent process that came to a head in an on-screen breakdown with an uncomfortable dose of realism. Iraqi civilians, many of whom had lost loved ones in the conflict, were also persuaded to lend their stories to the film as part of the predominantly amateur cast.

Despite responding to one symbolic episode, this fresh ammunition for the anti-war canon has an intentionally timeless quality. “Things like Haditha happen in any conflict, any war, anywhere,” reasons Broomfield. “The stuff that we filmed after the IED goes off is all based on reports: that’s all accurate, what happened in those houses. But I don’t want this to be seen as a forensic film. Haditha is a symbolic crime, but not such a rarity that it deserves to be looked at in isolation.”

While it may seem that the collective lens of the world’s media has been on Iraq since those first volleys were fired, it’s the other side’s perspective that has been conspicuously absent thus far: and this is the edge Haditha brings to the public debate.

“It’s a film about the language of war, and the common humanity that people share,” he declares. “In any conflict there are different points of view; it’s rarely good and evil. But most journalists have been stuck in the Green Zone throughout, and genuine Iraqi viewpoints are few and far between.”

Accordingly, the research also included flying to Aman to meet civilian survivors of the massacre – “who were there on the day, and knew the people who were killed” – plus spending a week with insurgents who had been directly involved with Haditha, and quizzing the journalist from Time magazine who first broke the story into public consciousness. The next step was securing government reports and witness statements to build as accurate a picture as possible, from multiple sides.

Iraqi witnesses and insiders in the marines told the same story: that the killings were indiscriminate as a knee-jerk reaction to their colleague’s death. Most shocking of all were the protocols he found through conversations with marines: “Their standard operating procedure rules are so fucking hardcore. If a house is described as ‘hostile’, then you just kill everyone in the house. It doesn’t matter if it contains two-year-olds or the elderly.”

But while he admits starting the project with some bias against the marines, meeting them in the flesh and realising that these were poverty-stricken kids with little or no education, thousands of miles from home in a conflict they didn’t understand, muddied the waters somewhat: “The deeper I dug into the whole story, the harder I realised it was to take a side. It was hard to condemn them out of hand as cold-blooded killers. I hope people will feel that judgment should be passed on the war itself, the architects of the war, and the future of the war. These are just poor bastards who got caught up in it.”

“Everyone has some kind of blinkered view, and it’s interesting that in some of the cinema discussions after the film, the two main camps realised just how blinkered they are. That’s what happens in war – but most traditional war films tend to be black and white, good and bad.”

Broomfield’s already made it clear that beyond the factual framework, the cast should make the piece their own, so I ask how he sees his own role in the production – particularly in still relatively unfamiliar dramatic territory.

“I enable people to deliver their performances in as relaxed a way as possible, and as real a way as possible,” he responds, after a short pause and a contemplative hmm. “It’s creating an environment that people can work in that makes them feel alright to be themselves, particularly if you’re working with non-actors. They shouldn’t be embarrassed: you want them for who they are.”

Of course, dramatic interpretation or not, Battle for Haditha has a grounding in fact – and was released while the trial was still in progress – so surely directorial control was crucial in places? “When dealing with specific milestones in the report, details from a legal document, we had to control people pretty tightly,” he confirms. “They couldn’t say whatever they wanted in those situations.”

“We worked from a pretty rigid structure of the story, but I was often steered by what they had to contribute: ‘We wouldn’t do it this way; we’d do it this way.’ I let them use their own language, being mindful that I didn’t want them acting being a marine: I wanted them being themselves. In a sense, they’re the experts – you don’t need one of those experts standing by.”

Given their deeply personal roots in the conflict, and intimate connections with its victims, surely the cast had their own agendas, even if the director endeavoured to avoid one of his own? “The film is all about agendas,” is the simple answer. “The marines, the insurgents, the people who get caught between those two forces, all have their own rationale for what they do. It’s about presenting those three agendas as accurately as possible, to an audience who probably has their own preconceptions.”

“Showing the film around, an Iraqi audience is very pro insurgents – would they even have taken money to do what they did? They see them as patriots. An American audience is always much more defensive about the marines.”

Three strands of narrative bind the film together, representing these three viewpoints: the pair of newly-recruited insurgents paid to plant the IED, the marines who seek revenge for its fatal detonation, and the civilians who are cut down indiscriminately as a result – several of whom see the bomb being planted in their quiet neighbourhood and choose to keep quiet.

While the brutality of the wider insurgency comes across, the two that plant the bomb are nervous and inexperienced, acting clumsily in the name of patriotism – but tellingly manage to flee the scene unharmed as gunfire erupts. The marines are brutal, dehumanised and reduced to killing machines by fear and rage, but ultimately emerge as pawns in a game much larger than themselves, endorsed by orders from above and crippled by remorse.

Iraqi civilian life is sketched out in various short episodes – a party to celebrate a circumcision, a boy playing with a goat, a family going to market – but this third group is finally crushed from both sides, with nowhere to turn. Crucially for Broomfield, all involved re-creating elements of their own lives, not acting several stages removed from it.

Some 15 years before Ghosts, his first venture into directing drama – 1989’s glossy Hollywood fare Diamond Skulls – he found overwhelming as a process, and readily admits to being embarrassed by the end result. Does mindless escapism and detachment from reality just not appeal?

“All forms of storytelling are interesting; I just happen to have grown up in a tradition of documentaries,” he reflects. “But I don’t like celebrity and all that goes with it: I enjoy getting to know normal people and their lives. For me, it’s about combining that with telling a structured story in an accessible way.”

Unlike that self-confessed blip on Broomfield’s CV, both Ghosts and Battle for Haditha shun the studio lights and contrived repetition of Hollywood to reveal something deeper about those involved.

“These are not pseudo actors; they’re real people who are being themselves,” he asserts. “That means you have to shoot in a different way; in real environments. You can’t shoot them on a set ’cause then they have to act, and they have no training in acting; they don’t know that the fuck they’re doing.”

Based in Jordan – Iraq was clearly too dangerous – the cast and crew lived as a community. “I had to create a barracks for the marines to live in, and the Iraqis were living in houses. If you’re shooting reverse angles, lighting the bejesus out of something and having hundreds of people standing around the set, you’ve got to have actors. It’s very, very difficult.”

By way of example, the bathroom in which Ruiz breaks down – purging himself of all those years of pent up anguish – doesn’t open up into a world of runners, tracks and dollies. It’s the actual bathroom used by the cast and crew. Maintaining the ‘real cinema’ approach are very long cuts. For the heart-rending mourning scene, the camera rolled for 40 minutes straight – no-one was going to ask the genuinely distressed women to go one more time for luck.

“I think the greatest thing that film has is the ability to describe real time,” argues Broomfield. “I don’t like lots of cuts: it’s really interesting to see a conversation, for example, or how long it takes for an argument to develop, rather than just cutting to an argument. We’re used to seeing things in real time, and cinema has the exciting ability to do that.”

“I grew up with anthropological, observational films, where the most interesting thing was seeing a long conversation between two guys in some weird language with subtitles. You get a sense of their rhythm, how they do things, what their humour’s like – no other art-form can do that.”

For Haditha he picked up countless tricks from special effects supervisor David Harris, including how to set up action shots to keep a lot of movement in the camera. “Certain things, particularly action, are also much more involving in real time than if you cut to the effect all the time,” he concludes. “It’s much more threatening if the human eye sees it as being real.”

© Nick Carson 2008. First published in Issue 9 of 4Talent magazine

A meticulous and moving reconstruction of an incident in late 2004, in which US marines are accused of slaughtering several Iraqi families in revenge for an IED attack on their convoy.  Directed by Nick Broomfield (Ghosts), with performances from real Iraqi refugees and real ex-marines.  See my review.

(Click here to see the whole film)

A pretty action-packed day by any standards. Just on my way home from the British Animation Awards at the National Film Theatre where we launched Channel 4’s new broadband animation channel – 4mations – in collaboration with Aardman and Lupus Films. What I liked most about the awards was that each award was a unique framed image made by an animation professional (including David Shrigley [Blur - Good Song, Hallam Foe titles], Darren Walsh [Angry Kid, Beck - Four Steps, Sony Bravia Play-Doh/rabbits] and Andy Martin [E4 Music, Kerrang! TV IDs] – you can see them all on the 2008 Prizes link on www.britishanimationawards.com) – unique images on the subject of sheep – BAA, baa, sheep, geddit? The whole thing was a celebration of the incredible talent across the UK in this tight-knit, ultimately for-love-not-money industry (not that it doesn’t make money but that’s not what drives its creatives). Happily, Shaun the Sheep picked up a couple of …sheep.

The wolves in sheeps clothing on this particular evening included Richard Morrison for the Sweeney Todd movie titles (produced by that blast from my past, Dominic Buttimore of Th1ng, convener of the annual Elvis birthday tribute at which an 8mm version of Blue Hawaii gets its yearly airing); Osbert Parker for Yours Truly, a thrillingly inventive film noirish animation made under the Animate scheme funded by Channel 4 and the Arts Council), one of three Channel 4 successes on the night; and Simon Tofield for the hilariously well observed feline dynamics captured in Cat Man Do – my favourite of the night.

Behind me in the queue going in was the venerable John Coates, creator of The Snowman and producer of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine film. One of the nominees was an IrnBru ad parodying The Snowman [Phenomenal Xmas by Robin Shaw/Sherbet], in which the high-pitched kid gets dropped out of the sky by the soaring snowman who nicks his tin. Rightly enough, John was flattered by the homage. The author of the source book, Raymond Briggs, was altogether less sanguine last autumn about this derivative. The Snowman was one of the very first commissions by Channel 4, a quarter of a century ago, which leads us neatly into the other action of the day…

The other end of the day saw the launch of Next on 4 – the blueprint for the next phase of Channel 4 as it moves into its second quarter century. There were a couple of moments of magic that lifted the whole event from a corporate function to an inspiring vision for public service broadcasting.

The first was a video clip. Times are tough. Competition is fierce. The media industries are up in the air. The public service broadcasting model is falling behind the times. The regulator’s breathing down your neck. You’ve been known to upset the powers that be. The advertising revenue is disappearing into the maw of US corporates. The halcyon days of Charlotte Street, The Comic Strip and Max Headroom are a dim&distant memory. The enemy’s at the gate. The wolves are at the door. What do you do? Get Nick Broomfield to make a spoof documentary about the purposes of Channel 4 culminating in a slurred elucidation by none other than Frank Gallagher, just in the Nick of time before the Grolsched-out mainstay of Shameless passes out. “The point of Channel 4, Nicholush, is to maintain the salience of its remit in the new digital age.” Are you people taking this seriously? We are – because only Channel 4 would turn it to comedy (with substance). The medium is very much the message.

The second was a Churchillian moment from the Chairman, Luke Johnson. After struggling a bit during the opening address with the awkwardness that is those autocue systems with the smoked grey glass plates on bendy stalks , to round off the Q&A (hosted in the style we love him for by Jon Snow) Luke responded to the final question by reminding us all that Next on 4, this event, the debate around Channel 4 as Ofcom reviews our public service broadcasting, is all about the value of Channel 4 to UK society and the values and public purposes which drive it. Think Henry V. Think an authentic moment when the passion for an idea breaks through a breach in corporate decorum. Think raw not baa.

Kiss puns are great. I’ve said it. They are great.

Robbie’s going all UFO on us. He is still a pop star, yes? (Thank you to PopSugar UK)

Fifty most influential blogs. I’m not there. That’s fair.

The Guardian also has a great profile of Samantha Morton and on the dearth of interest in bleak Iraq filmmaking.

Obama has scored a proxy victory over McCain with the congressional seat win for Bill Foster.

Alec Baldwin discusses Hillary and her experience on The Huffington Post.

Stephen A Crockett Jr is an addict. Of The Wire. Read his story.

Everyone loves The THAT. Check the stats.

Another link to the fantastic Michael Chabon essay on superheroes for The New Yorker.

Bush has sealed his legacy with the veto of a bill which again protects executive power.

Amy Adams is doing a different type of reputation cementing with her performance in Miss Pettigrew.

Sopranos debate.

EWWWW!!!!! Paula Abdul is going to make a comeback album.

Rolling Stone has endorsed Barack Obama.

The Pakistani government rivals Musharraf and Zardari have formed a coalition pact.

Buffy lesbian action. Except Buffy. Not Willow. Buffy. Yep.

Here’s the fifty best paid folk of last year.

Here’s Norman Mailer having a scrap with Rip Torn.

Time talks to Dee Dee Myers, the first female press secretary.

Mother Jones interviews a renditionee.

Phosphorescent does a great set for Daytrotter.