My Country, Your Country: Iraq at the Academy Awards
On
Sunday, February 25 at the Kodak Center— that architectural
counterpart to Celine Dion — Laura
Poitras strutted her Sunday best before Hollywood’s favorite
vanity mirror, the Academy Awards. Poitras isn’t a member
of the star system. Yet, she was on the red carpet as a nominee
for Best Documentary Feature — the thinking person’s
reality TV. Her film, My
Country, My Country, is a labor of love that she shot single-handedly
in some of the most dangerous military industrial complex-prone
territory in the world. Poitras has seen what the war dealt the
Iraqi people — or, as George W. Bush likes to call them, “the
good folks of Iraq.”
“Unfortunately,
the debate about the war, both for and against,” Poitras told
me, “is really a debate about America, not a debate about the
people who are dying in the tens of thousands.”
 My
Country, My Country follows Riyadh, a Sunni doctor, during
his campaign for local office in the 2005 Iraqi elections — the
event our mainstream media spun as a purple-thumb validation of
democracy and voter participation. Bush, you may recall, characterized
that election as “a watershed moment in the story of freedom.”
Poitras
was witnessing that "story of freedom" more as a tale of
terror. She recently received an email from one of Dr. Riyadh’s
daughters. This is what it said:
“I
want you to tell the American people that because of the war we lost
everything beautiful in our lives — even our simple and sweet
dreams and our ability to smile.”
Unfortunately,
Dr. Riyadh and his family couldn’t make it to the Kodak Theater.
The US doesn’t give visas to unhappy Iraqis unless they work
for Halliburton or deal in oil. The Riyadhs are now living in exile,
driven from their country out of concerned for their lives.
“They’re
refugees now,” Poitra said. “It was too dangerous in
his old neighborhood. Dr. Riyadh says that he’s known 200 people
personally who have been killed or assassinated.”
A
week after he fled the country, Riyadh got word that four of his
local council members had been found dead — killed with drills
to the head. Had he not bolted from the country, he may have suffered
the same fate.
Poitras
continued. “This is really hard to comprehend. As we’re
debating here — troops, no troops — it doesn’t
begin to address the fact of who is left? Who is left there to build
this country?”
 Increasingly,
the “who” that’s left are the angriest, most radical
members of Iraqi society. According
to the UN, the number of Iraqis fleeing their homeland has increased
to 40,000 a month — almost double the rate from only a few
months ago.
“Iraq
is hemmoraging,” Poitras said. “We’re largely responsible
for that and we’re not talking about it. It’s like running
over someone with your car and wanting them to say “thank you.’”
But
that’s exactly the message that Bush is driving home. As he
said in a January
14th interview on 60 Minutes, “I think the Iraqi
people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude. That’s
the problem here in America. They wonder whether or not there is
a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.”
Thanks
for that, Mr. President. But don’t count Poitras, or for that
matter, the majority of Americans among those who feel Iraqi gratitude-entitled.
“The
question for me,” Poitras said, “is what is the moral
obligation of our country to the people of Iraq? I think it’s
huge. That’s the starting point for any conversation.”
In
addition to her nomination for an Academy Award, Poitras’ other
distinctly American honor is that she’s made the Department
of Homeland Security “Watch List.” Her threat-rating
of 400 is the highest on the DHS scale.
“There’s
all kinds of drama when I fly — particularly internationally
when I come back,” she said.
But
here’s where this filmmaker's saga gets curioser. The U.S.
military invited Poitras to its bases and military colleges to screen
the film for high-ranking US officers to provide more understanding
about Iraqi culture.
“I’m
on military bases being treated as a distinguished speaker, yet there’s
somebody in Washington who thinks I’m a dangerous filmmaker,” she
said.
It’s
wouldn't be surprising if the Bush administration had every one of
the filmmakers nominated for this year’s Best Documentary Feature
on an enemies list. Besides My
Country, My Country, there was James Longley’s Iraq
in Fragments, a gorgeously filmed study of Sunnis, Shiites,
and Kurds, Amy Berg’s Deliver
Us From Evil, a close-up look at Catholic priest pedophilia,
Heidi Ewing’s and Rachel Grady’s Jesus
Camp, a controversial trip to a "take back America
for Christ" summer camp for kids, and of coursethe winner, Davis
Guggenheim's and Al “Global Warming” Gore’s An
Inconvenient Truth.
I
asked Poitras if her nomination has changed her in any way? She laughs.
“I’m
really happy to be among those films — particularly James Longley’s Iraq
in Fragments. We’ve got two films from the point of view
of the Iraqi people at the Academy Awards. When we think about how
much news coverage we have on Iraq, and how little we actually hear
from Iraqis and know about Iraqis, these nominations are a great
message to send.”
Let’s
hope we all get the message. Outside the lines of debate on the war,
with its timely procedures, predatory bullshit and calculated eloquence
in service of poll numbers and public opinion upward mobility, there’s
a land where a half-inch bit drilled through your head is the rule
of order. It’s a place where everything beautiful in life has
been lost. It’s a place where, more and more, we are in debt
to its people.
— Nathan
Callahan, February 21, 2007
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