"Heavy Metal in Baghdad"

Last night I saw this documentary called Heavy Metal in Baghdad. I'd never heard of it but apparently it's been on the festival circuit a while and had a limited theatrical release back in May in New York and LA.

I love it when I go into a movie with no expectations and am absolutely blown away by it. "Heavy Metal in Baghdad," directed by Brooklyn-based filmmakers Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti is about Iraq's only heavy metal band living in Baghdad at the height of the insurgency in 2006.

The band, Acrassicauda, is a group of four young Iraqis who just want to be free to rock out, grow their hair long and "head bang" but their whole world is literally on fire around them. The bombing of the rehearsal space they used for six years, recounted through the footage of one of the band member's shaky home videos, is gut wrenching, as is his argument that no one cares...that stuff like this is your personal problem. (The filmmakers come back to this moment in a powerful coda at the end.)

The film had a special resonance for me because the night before I went to hear South African poet Dennis Brutus speak at the Brecht Forum. There he was talking about how comfortable life in America is. He made this point to explain why politics exists here on such a superficial level. We aren't desperate. We aren't fighting matters that are life and death. And yet American culture is world culture. The irony of "Heavy Metal in Baghdad" is that it is a love song to American freedom from a place where the advent of democracy brings not release but bullets and bombs.

Walking through the West Village after the screening, the idea of our relative comfort stuck with me. As I stopped to pee in Grom, that fancy gelato place on Bleecker, I kept thinking about how most of us have no idea how it is to live with death and suffering in that very real way. So how do we make the world a more equitable place?

The poet Dennis Brutus suggested it was a matter of educating America about the rest of the world. He claims if people had a real sense of global events, we would do more to work within social movements that create change.

But I'm not so sure. I think somewhere along the line we've stopped caring about anything other than ourselves. We change the channel. We eat gelatos (very delicious gelatos, albeit)...and we rent meaningful movies and fail to watch them.

Apologies for the heavy post, but I've had two nights of feeling like the universe is trying to tell me something...though right now she's sending it in code and I sure do feel like an inadequate listener.